Guerrilla History - Why Anti-Racism Means Anti-Capitalism w/ Arun Kundnani

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

In this important episode, Arun Kundnani comes on the show to discuss his new book What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism.  This is a fascinating discussion that focuses on liberal vs. radical conceptions of antiracism, and why liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression.  This topic is important for us to think about as we build movements that tackle all forms of oppression, including racial oppression.   Arun Kundnani has been active in antiracist movements in Britain and the United States for three decades. He is a former editor of the journal Race & Class and was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.  His website can be found at https://www.kundnani.org/ and you can follow him on Twitter @@ArunKundnani. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Vin? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. The podcast that acts is a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my two co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director at the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. It's great to be with you. It's always nice to see you. Also joined as usual by Brett O'Shea, who of course is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you today? Hello, I'm doing very good. It's always nice to see you as well. Now, before I introduce our guests on the topic at hand, I want to remind the listeners that you can help support the show by going to patreon.com

forward slash gorilla history, with gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. All of your contributions there are what allow us to continue doing the show as we never run ads, and we have no external funding other than from listeners like you. You can also keep up with the show on Twitter or whatever the show is, whatever the website is named by searching for at Gorilla underscore Pod again G-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Skord. Now, today we have an excellent guest

and about a really fascinating book. We're joined by Arun Kunani, who is author of the new book, What is Anti-Racism and why it means anti-capitalism? Hello, Arun. It's nice to have you on the show. Hi, folks. Good to be here. Thank you having me. Absolutely.

I know that we're all very excited to talk about this book with you. But I want to get the conversation started by just focusing on one phrase within the title of your book and then having you kind of trace out this phrase through history, which is anti-racism. Anti-racism is something that is very present within popular consciousness right now, although the framing of anti-racism within popular consciousness, broadly speaking, is a very liberal conception of anti-racism. racism. And within your work, one of the things that you do is you trace anti-racism along two paths, a liberal conception of anti-racism and a radical conception of anti-racism, starting

really back in the 1930s for each of them. So if you could, could you give us a brief sketch of what anti-racism is, how it's conceived along these two lines, kind of the historical development of anti-racism in these two trajectories. And then we can hop into the conversation and dig in a little bit deeper to try to disentangle these two conceptions from one another. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I think we, you know, we could talk about this in not a different way, but the way I kind of get into this in the book is to look at where does the word racism come from, actually, right? And when does it emerge and start to get used? And one of the surprising things is it's really only in the 1930s that the word racism gets taken up as a term to understand.

understand three different things that until then hadn't really been put together as as similar to each other, needing one word to describe them. So one of those was anti-Semitism. One of those is the kind of ideas that legitimize European colonialism around the world. And the third is the kind of oppression of people of African origin in the Americas. And this, and this, the word racism is getting picked up and used in by two different camps, as you mentioned in introducing the question. So on the one hand, you've got people who are broadly liberal in their politics who are thinking about the emergence of Nazism in the 1930s and trying to understand it. And so nowadays, you know, we, it's, it's kind of obvious that racism is central.

to Nazism, but at a time, it wasn't, it wasn't obvious. And, and, and you have, so a kind of key person here is, is Magnus Hirschfeld, who's kind of pioneer of kind of gay rights activism, working in Germany in the early 20th century, and he's queer, he's Jewish, his, he set up an institute of sexology, as he called it, and which was shut down when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and, you know, know, they burned the books from his institute outside on the street. And he was exiled. And so he then sits down and he's based in France and trying to think about what's happened.

You know, like how's this happened? And he develops an account that will sound pretty familiar, I think, to us now, which is the, you know, over the course of the previous hundred years or so leading up to the rise of Nazism, you had. intellectuals in Europe and scientists in Europe who told the public that the human species divided into some number of different racial groups and there's a hierarchy of inferiority and superiority in those groups and those ideas became part of general kind of modern understanding of who we are and and then when you had an extremist party like the Nazi party

try to come to power in Germany in the 20s and 30s, were able to use kind of hate-fuelled emotional propaganda to exploit those pre-existing prejudices to come to power and abolish liberal democracy. And so that's the argument. And it's an argument that I think runs right through to the present day coming from liberals as to how liberal how liberal democracy can be threatened from the far right and how racism is central to that. And it's the argument that most people use to understand what was happening with Trump. And this is this really goes back to Herzfeld's book that

he first wrote in German with the title Racismus and then that's translated into English with the title racism which is what racism means in German and that comes out in the late 30s in English and that's the first book that really uses the word

racism as a concept now at the same time as that's happening you've got activists in lectures in working in parts of the world that have been colonised by Europe, in particular in the Caribbean, in fact, people like CLR James, the Trinidadian writer, who also start using this word racism, but understanding it in a very different way. What they mean by it is not some set of ideas that have been implanted in ordinary people's minds,

some set of attitude, some doctrine. They don't think of it as a set of ideas really fundamentally. Think of it as a set of structures by which they mean, you know, a set of social rules that followed by society that organize the way that society works politically, culturally, economically and so on, and enable a distribution of resources that leaves white people white minorities in Caribbean for example with a hugely disproportionate share of the resources

and so that's really the origin of what we might think of as an idea of structural racism and there's a line that you can trace from those people thinking about colonialism and the economic function of colonialism in places like the Caribbean

under European rule through to people trying to think about what structural racism might look like today and so for them it's like yes there's going to be people who are prejudiced who have individual prejudices who have individual racial attitudes and so on but that's not the fundamental reality of what racism is the fundamental reality is this power relationship that delivers wealth for certain groups I just want to plug a past episode very quickly for the listeners

so one thing that you mentioned Arun was that The Nazis were weaponizing rhetoric based on these racialized divisions or other divisions within society. Just to remind listeners to go back, we have over a year ago, probably about a year and a half ago, we have an episode with the renowned Austrian linguist Ruth Vodok talking about far-right rhetoric and the politics of fear where we go through how these rhetorical usages of these terms really did build. into these far right parties and how these far right parties utilize this kind of terminology in order to build

their political projects. So just to throw that out there, listeners, if you haven't checked out that episode with the linguist with Vodok, go back and listen to it. It was about a year and a half ago at this point. Yeah, so I have a lot of things I would like to ask, and certainly we can get to him as the conversation develops.

But stepping back a little bit, I'm sort of just personally curious as to your own personal motivations to write this book. what events were happening. What exactly was it that inspired you to write this book? And what were you kind of hoping to accomplish with it? Yeah.

To answer that question fully requires, you know, like, why you end up, why you end up writing a book is, is, I mean, certainly for me, this book is, is the result of sort of activism I've been involved in since, since I was, you know, quite young in my late teens, I guess. So, so, you know, there's a lot in. there that in my in my kind of mind is derived from all those experiences and all those kind of conversations over the years and all those all those kind of things that we've tried to to take on um the oppression that we've experienced like my and and also you know going back to my

past right like so yeah my my my um my father was involved in in anti-colonial politics in in india um against the british when he was a teenager um uh and my grandfather So my dad's from India, my mum's from Holland and my grandfather on my mum's side was in a Nazi concentration camp in Holland during the 1940s for a couple of years and we're not sure exactly why but it seems most likely

because he was helping Jews who were in Iding by stealing ration cards from the town hall where he worked and passing them on to the underground. And so those are some of the things that were just present for me around the kitchen table in terms of how when I was coming up. But, you know, the more immediate source of it is just the, just being very struck and getting kind of enraged by what happened over the last few is around the, you know, the uprising in 2020, around the murder of George Floyd, right? So in that moment, it seemed to me we had, you know, a hugely significant event, just in terms of a scale of it, right?

Like the New York Times reported something like 15 million people on the streets. And in my experience, you know, the average age of them would have been something like 18 years old, like very young. We are organizing themselves on apps that I've never even heard of. And the, it was exciting. You know, it's exciting. And they were pretty, you know, the sort of center of gravity of what people in that uprising were thinking about was the police, the prisons, the border regimes, these are not infrastructures that need reform, these are infrastructures that need to be tear down because the whole purpose of them and the whole way that they're structured is to impose a kind of racial violence, right? and uphold a system of oppression, right?

So this was not a liberal, this was not a liberal politics of saying, you know, we need to change individual officers' attitude so that they don't perpetrate racism in their job as a police officer. We need to kind of, you know, get more professional kind of police officers who don't bring their personal prejudices into their work and so on. You know, that wasn't the argument at all, right? So this was a, this was coming out of, you know, going back to that distinction that we started with,

this was coming out of that radical tradition, not the liberal tradition. But then the response that was coming out of the kind of liberal institutions of the United States was, was, okay, we do, you know, there was obviously this moment of people talking about a racial reckoning, right, of like, you know, we're going to, we're going to do the work now, we're going to kind of do the podcasts, and we're going to do the books, and we're going do the training in all these different settings, whether it's universities or human resource departments in corporations or, you know, wherever. And what the assumption was in the way that those institutions took up this moment

was that, you know, white people need to look deeply inside themselves to discover these kind of unconscious biases and work on that. And this would be the way that we would get to a place where, we wouldn't have more George Floyd's getting killed by the police. But, you know, really, what was going on there was that a much more radical analysis of racial oppression, a radical anti-racism, was getting redirected by liberal institutions into what was much more familiar for liberals, which was this other idea of anti-racism. It's about thinking about our unconscious biases.

thinking about how do we do, you know, diversity training to kind of change individual minds, right? Which, which, which, and there's a direct line from that back to what we were talking about before, you know, coming out of the 1930s, whether it's Magnus Hirschfeld or other figures like Ruth Benedict or Gunnarndel who, who, you know, see racism in this way, where it's this kind of heroic effort of white people to kind of turn inward and reflect on their own, um, preconceptions and then emerge, um, a better human being through some kind of process of changing themselves, right? And that's, I mean, there was a, there was perhaps a moment in, you know, a few decades ago where that was of some value, right? And where individual prejudices were

needing to be challenged in that way. But we're not in that moment now. The way, you know, the center of, the center of gravity of how racist oppression works today is not, there's lots of prejudice individuals who, who then shape institutions to carry out racial oppression. It's These institutions are carrying out racial oppression, irrespective of what, you know, what level of individual prejudices exists in broader society, because what's driving them is not individual prejudices, but the deeper structures of, of a racial capitalist world, right, that require certain kinds of racial division of labour and so on that need to be upheld by these structures of violence, like policing, like borders and so on, right?

And so unless we get to understanding how the, um, you know, the structure in structural racism is something like capitalism, something like racial capitalism. Unless we get to that, you know, everything else ends up being a cut in the end of distraction, I think, and in the end, a way of actually perpetuating the system, right? I mean, I think that we need to be quite forceful in saying that, you know, that all that time and energy that was put into, you know, unconscious by Australian diversity. strain, all this kind of stuff. It's not just like that isn't going to solve all that problems. It's actually that that is a distraction and that is getting in the way of what we really need to be doing. Yeah, well, you're getting at this as well. There's a way in which the cause

and effect are switched under liberals where they individualize and psychologize racism and then say, you know, these bad ideas in people's heads then go on to poison these institutions. Whereas obviously from a more radical Marxist perspective, we understand the reverse. You know, these are embedded in the very structures of capitalism stemming as they do from European colonialism, and then they are disseminated down ideologically into the minds of individuals. So if you try to attack the problem on the individual psychological scale, you're not actually addressing the root of the issue. You're just addressing its sort of symptoms. And that's why that base analysis of structure first, I think is so essential and really does, like when the rubber meets the road, it really does

make the difference in your approach and then how you think about. solving the problem, starting from a structural as opposed to an individual and psychological perspective. Yeah. I just want to follow up with that conversation. And before we get into, you know, really what I think is the crux of this kind of race versus class type debate that Marxism and, you know, radical left thinkers have been wrestling with and how you elaborate on this. I wanted to just go back to the very, you know, what I think of as the very first chapter and picking up on those personal motivations that you were just describing. And what I thought was just, I knew as soon as I read this, that this was going to be a fantastic read and a great

book was How to Hide a Genocide, which is in some ways where you set up after the introduction, the problems you're going to be looking at and the way you're going to look at them in a really unique way that I just wanted to come back to that because this book is historical, but it's also constantly recalling us to the present and use a lot of oscillation analytically and through making these connections between that era of the 30s, the rise of fascism, the emergence of this kind of discourse on racism, what is racism and anti-racism, and the birth of these different trajectories and traditions of, you know, thinking about and defining what it is and the politics that come out of it. And like our contemporary moment. And this chapter just really does that

by talking about that Woot, I don't know how to pronounce it, the Dutch. Yeah, you got a bit of a Dutch. It's Wurst. Yes, okay, you got to get that in there. Yeah, the Wurt. Right. So this Wacht concentration camp that is today part museum memorial, you know, commemorating World War II history in a very narrow and particular way for the contemporary liberal state. And also, you know, a high security prison, particularly specializing in max security for detaining people who are part of the, you know, global war on terror. And there's almost all Muslims in that max security kind of portion and talking about the interconnections. And it's how to hide a genocide, I thought, very appropriately, because not only does it hide the genocide of the 30s and its roots and really what was going on and who are the victims and why, and also the genocide going on now that I think you're getting at. So I wanted to ask you if you could talk a little bit more, just as you've done in previous.

work, which is why I'm so excited about this book. And the Muslims are coming, something we've talked about before on a different podcast, the Mudgellis listeners, go check that out, about the way in which anti-Muslim, you know, racism, Islamophobia is constitutive or necessary in the global war on terrorism and how that is part of this larger. And here you're sketching that larger kind of interconnections. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what you wanted us to understand from this. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, like, so I, I mentioned before my grandfather was in this, was in this concentration camp in Holland, that's called Vux. And, and, um, so, you know, I mean, really the story for this starts, starts, um, 12 or so years ago, and I was

visiting the Netherlands and I thought I should go and see this camp where my grandfather was. And so there's a kind of memorial at the camp, you know, I think people probably familiar with these kinds of projects in different concentration camps in Europe where there's an attempt to memorialize what happened there and, you know, there's a kind of historical, there's this kind of series of rooms that you walk through that give you the kind of historical story of how this camp was created and what happened there and so on. And you can, you know, it's kind of replicas of what it all looked like and so on. So, you know, so I was interested in that part, in part because of my family history and so on i was looking through that and then as you're walking through the grounds of

this memorial um which has this kind of replica of the of the buildings where where um the people in the camp were held you look over to one side and you notice that there's this really high wall around the edge of it and um and on the top of the wall there's there's barbed wire and CCTV cameras and you're sort of notice that there's there's something else across the other side that has this as you know that has this kind of wall protecting it and so when you walk outside the memorial at the front, you look over and you realize that there's actually the entrance to a prison that's functioning today that is on the site that was built by the Nazis as a concentration cap. So essentially the concentration cap is still, like the building of it is

still being used as a functioning prison. And when you, you know, I remember when I, when I looked over, firstly, I was like, wow, that's extremely disturbing that that they just decided to basically use this concentration campus of prison. But then also you look at, you know, the queue of people that's lining up to go visit prisoners. And I noticed that most of the people were women wearing burqas and hijabs and nukhams and so on. And so I then started digging into it. In fact, I asked some of the people in the memorial, like what's going on there?

And it turns out that there is a high security prison operating on this site where Muslims who are considered extremists in the war on terror being held often for long periods of our trial and often after conviction, you know, on things that look very much like just acts of speech, you know, like posting something on a social media platform or something like that. And so you start digging into what's going on in this high security unit and essentially they're practicing the same kinds of, techniques of controlling prisoners that you know that come out of the US supermax model and that also you know then brought to Guantanamo to Abu Ghrabe and Bagram and so on all these other sites of the global war on terror

and so you you know you realize that while we're walking around this memorial and there's these kind of historical lessons that the designers of the memorial have created that say you know the lessons of what happened here in the 1930s is never be a bystander to, to, you know, prejudice and racism and so on. And actually, we are absolutely, literally, bystanders, because we don't see what's happening right across the other side of that wall. Well, people are being, you know,

solitary confinement of that sort that's practiced there is a form of torture. You know, it's mental torture. That's what the sort of medical experts have recognized. So, you know, we're seeing a form of mental torture being practiced in a way that's totally bound up with a form of racism, right? Like, I mean, if you think about the war on terror, you can't really understand how that's, you know, like, how has it been possible for the US government, you know, in alliance with governments like the UK to go into a country like Iraq and completely destroy that country, you know, like, I mean, this feels like an old story, but in many ways it feels like we've never told this story fully and truthfully, right? like the story of what happened in the 2003 invasion in subsequent years, right? I mean, we killed at best hundreds of thousands of civilians, but likely many more.

It's, I would say, you know, the evidence seems to say that it's well over a million civilians who, whose lives were, you know, lost. And we did that as essentially an imperialist and racist war of aggression, right? And that's genocide. I mean, that that matches the definition of genocide. So, you know, we didn't need, we didn't need to do what the Nazis did to carry out that genocide.

We didn't need to create like an SS, like agents of the state who were separate from the regular agents of the state and able to carry out forms of violence that regular agents of the state wouldn't be willing to. We did it with the regular agents of the state, the regular military, right? and the regular judges approved it and the regular politicians they didn't need to grab power and create a dictatorship it was just the normal functioning

of a liberal democracy right and so you know so that's that's how we hide a genocide today and that's how we fail to really understand like the lesson that we should be taking from that past

is not you know here is this unique event here is this singularity that over through liberal democracy and now let's let's kind of make sure that we don't allow the same kind of individual prejudices

to circulate so that can happen, the liberal story. The story is that you know, we can do that today without having to overthrow liberal democracy. We can carry out of genocides, right? And we do it in the name of anti-extremism. We say that, you know, we're fighting

extremists, right? And that's what we've felt to understand. And And then the kind of, you know, so then the question is, well, what is the purpose of that, of that huge scale of, you know, military violence that is carried out? Is it, is it the expression of some just of some kind of irrational hatred that just somehow circulates in society and then gets expressed in this way, which, which would be the way to rescue some kind of liberal version of this story, right? Well, no, that's not what happened, right? I mean, I think the, you know, when you look at the, closely at the political economy of the war on terror, what you have to conclude is that like the war on drugs and like the war on immigration,

that these infrastructures of violence exist to deal with what we can call the surplus populations, the populations of the world that cannot be integrated into neoliberal capitalism and therefore represent a threat they represent a zone of people who are considered

by neoliberal capitalism to be ungovernable, unintegratable and therefore have to be dealt with through violence they can't be dealt with in any other way and that's really where this comes right and I think um and so part of part of what the radical anti-racist tradition allows us to do is to is to be able to get to understanding that and that's why it's crucial that we that we've um understand that at the moment well um just as a quick uh follow up to that it was um i found also quite interesting the way in which uh the same kinds of ideologies and techniques and practices that are part of like you know isolation and this max security mass incarceration were being used not only in the treatment of detainees of the global war on terrorism,

but that that same we need to break down at the psychological level, that was at the level of projected at the level of culture for whole nations that, well, what we have to do, these neoconservatives seem to have imported the same sort of perspective when it came to kind of global affairs and war, which is that, well, we have to just sort of break down the state in these places. in order to be able to change the culture and institute liberal and democratic values in the same way that, well, we've got these radical prisoners who pose a problem or a threat to the structure of prison because they're very unruly. And so we need to kind of put them in isolation. And that's what it seemed like the global war on terrorism, both the invasions, but also the sanctions regimes, both before and after, you know, the overt military invasions have done. a kind of isolation, a global sort of way of the level of geopolitics. And we've been doing a whole series actually on sanctions as war. And I think, you know, really even benefits from the analysis of this as, you know, imprisonment and that the kind of structures that you were

talking about that were that were, you know, used in the U.S. prison industrial complex. I don't know if you have any comment on that. Connection, but that seemed to me. me partly what was also going on in these connections that you're making. Yeah, absolutely. And so the sort of interesting origin story for that is that you get this set of ideas emerging from the sort of late 50s, early 60s in the United States, Federal Bureau of Prisons where there's psychologists who are working for the Federal Bureau of Prisons who have been studying prisoners of war who've come back from Korea and China and there's a there's a

perception that well the the communists in China have got some kind of brainwashing capability that can kind of take people and turn them into communists and we need that technology for ourselves you know this kind of stuff is kind of Manchurian candidate stuff right and and and so they start they start trying to figure out from from these prisoners who've come back what it was and actually what's going on is that for a small number of Americans serving in Korea they're actually persuaded that maybe the Korean system is a bad system and they go over and side of the communists and then retrospectively it gets described as brainwashing right but but so what happens is is that psychologists believing that communists have this

capability start to try and replicate it themselves and they figure out that that if you want to take someone who's in your prison and totally change their their their personality in every fundamental way, what you have to do is isolate them, right? And you develop solitary and solitary confinement as a technique. In its kind of modern kind of late 20th century sense and 21st century sense comes at that thinking, right? And it's like through isolation and through cutting off any kind of human contact,

you break down someone's personality to a kind of blank slate. And then after that, you can then rebuild it, right? That's the model. And that's what then gets used, you know, in huge. on a huge scale by the late 20th century in America's prisons with any person in the prison system who's considered disruptive or politically active, which obviously means that there's a disproportionality of black people getting targeted in that way, even more than the disproportionality that's even greater than the disproportionality of black people in prison. And then the same techniques

are then used in the war on terror prisons. But you know, you're absolutely right. And there's a very similar logic in the thinking that, you know, that went into the war in Iraq, where the idea was that there's something so deeply barbaric about the culture of people in Iraq, that only a war that destroys the entire social fabric that erases and creates that blank slate again on the Iraqi personality writ large will be sufficient to be able to then transform that culture into one that is compatible with neoliberal capitalism and no longer a perceived to be an antagonist to it, right? And so that's, that's, you know, Tony Blair is, is pretty explicit in describing that as the thinking that, for him, justifies the war, right? And, you know, he's been

talking to, you know, the neo-conservatives and the Orientalist, like Bernard Lewis and so on, and that's what they've led him to. And so he, you know, he says, it's not a war of regime change. It's a war of values change, right? And that's what he means by values change is erase and rebuild in the same way that you do with someone in solitary confined. So I want to start to move us on a little bit. And Brett, I know you have something on this topic as well. So I'll let you ask the question, but I will kind of introduce the topic, which is that when we think of racism, we oftentimes think of how that relates to capitalism. And of course, that's absolutely true.

But something that is generally left out of broader discourse within the Western left, thinking specifically of the United States and the UK, is the role of colonialism and imperialism. with racism and of course you know on the more radical left that is something that is going to be talked about but I'm talking about more within the the broad kind of liberal left those ideas of colonialism and imperialism are often left completely out of the discussion when we're talking about racism and again that goes back to that liberal conception of racism of being an individual problem within one's mind rather than being a structural um a problem you know a systemic problem that is inherent to the system that we're living in. And, of course, thinking about colonialism and thinking about imperialism, these are not

discrete policies. These are not individual things that are done. You know, this is a colonialist policy. And therefore, if we fix this one policy, all of a sudden colonialism ends and therefore racism that is associated with colonialism ends. No, the system is colonial. And therefore, that one policy is not what the whole thing, it's not a house of cards that it's all built on one policy. And if we fix this one thing, all of a sudden, racism is

going to disappear because colonialism disappears. We have to actually focus on the fact that within these countries, we are within, you know, the imperialist and colonial core. And that the structures and the systems of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism are directly related to racism. And without confronting that, without confronting the legacies of colonialism and imperialism and the ongoing realities of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism, we're never going to be able to correctly grapple with racism. That's something that's often left out from more liberal, you know, anti-racist circles. So thinking about, I'm not going to name any particular scholars here, I probably will later,

because some of them really make me angry that they get so much traction, despite having such vapid commentary on anti-racism. without grappling with, you know, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, or maybe they'll say the word capitalism here, but what they then push for is anti-racist capitalism rather than moving beyond capitalism. Okay, I'll say any. Ibrahim X. Kendi, somebody who says that, you know, the solution is not racial capitalism. It's anti-racist capitalism.

Okay, sorry, capitalism is inherently racist. If your solution is capitalism, you are wrong. You're not going to get there. But that's why the capitalist class funnels tens of millions of dollars into his center. That's why, you know, it's something that the capitalist class is able to work along with. Anyway, let me try to put this back together so that Brett can then go ahead with an actual question rather than the rantings of a madman, me, which is to say that, you know, we do have to focus on imperialism. We do have to focus on colonialism.

And these are things that have been focused on by thinkers in the past that we have to take the lessons up to be able to constitute like a correct understanding of racism and then a correct understanding of what anti-racism is and what it should be. So Brett, go ahead with your question. I totally agree and that's a great setup for this precise question because when I think of colonialism, I think of three things that it's generated, right? It's capitalism, imperialism. Colonial, a primitive accumulation stage of the development of capitalism, imperialism. It generated modern racism as the ideological superstructure that then bled into capitalism, imperialism, but was really forged through the material process of colonialism. But then dialectically, it also creates its

opposition, these anti-colonial thinkers who, you know, were the victims of colonialism and analyzed it and analyzed racism through that lens. So with all of that in mind, you obviously center several anti-colonial revolutionary thinkers in your book that explicitly tied racism and capitalism together who actually struck at the root of these problems in a meaningful way. Can you kind of talk about some of those thinkers and what their contributions to our understanding of racism and capitalism are today? So yeah, I think, I think, you know, I talked earlier about CLR James writing in the 1930s and starting to use the term racism to describe the structures, the economic and social and cultural structures of societies in the Caribbean that were under European rule, right?

And really, from that, from that period in the early 20th century, through to the 1970s, you have this kind of huge intellectual flourishing, actually, that reaches from, you know, from the Caribbean to East Asia of huge numbers of people trying to figure out, like, what is this thing, European colonialism? How do we get rid of it? and how do we think about what we then build in its place once we've liberated our countries, right? Now, some of those thinkers aren't seeing the question of capitalism as central, right? In fact, that's probably the mainstream of anti-clinial thinking is to say, you know,

this is a temporary kind of form of domination that we can, we can get rid of within a you know within a period of time and then we get to being able to compete in in in you know on a level playing field in a capitalist system and that's what we want for our for our ruling class in india or in jamaica or wherever to be able to to freely compete with other ruling classes right but um i think the the the more interesting line of thinking that comes through people like c l r james like franz fanon like ms is it yeah um like quamain Krumer is that there is this implication between colonialism and capitalism, right? And one of the things that colonialism does is force capitalism onto countries that wouldn't

otherwise have chosen to have capitalism, right? And what, you know, so you mentioned, or Henry, you mentioned that, you know, how in the United States and in the United Kingdom, we don't have a good sense of. of, you know, of what colonialism and imperialism is, which is certainly true. In the United Kingdom, you know, there's a sense that, you know, the British Empire was this thing that existed in the past, but that was a long time ago. And now, we've, you know, we're in a different era, a different world. And the, perhaps there's a few sort of legacies that that's handed down, you know,

to the present day in terms of British life. But essentially, it's, you know, post-colonial. post-imperial situation. The United States we haven't really even got to that point of sort of seeing a sense of US imperialism as a part of US history

it's kind of totally erased from the conversation right and we you know the closest you get in the United States to thinking about imperialism is well we you know we fight these wars these wars of aggression at you know various points in US history but the core

you know the core of imperialism and the core of the neo-coloninism that continues that in Krumer, you know, began to theorise when he was writing in the 1960s, is an economic relationship. It's not a, it's not a military oppression, right? The military oppression is part of it, but the purpose of that military oppression and the normal functioning of that relationship, that imperialist relationship, is not actually all about military violence, but is about an economic relationship, right? That is continue to you know, continuing to extract wealth continuously from most of the world to the imperialist countries in ways that, you know, have not diminished actually in scale since, you know, what we normally

think of as the heyday of imperialism, you know, at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, right? And so, but what's happened is that it's been, it's become possible for that process of imperialist wealth extraction to take place with a if you like a diversified global ruling class in place right it looks that actually is different in its demographics from what that what that global ruling class would have looked like a hundred years ago right so so the you know and this is what fanon franz fanon was was absolutely right to predict which is that one of the possible consequences of the anti-clonial campaigns in the mid 20th century

which radically redrew the map of the world. You know, these were mass movements that had a very fundamental transformative effect on the overall structure of the world, right? But Fanon was right to warners in the midst of those struggles, those national liberation struggles against European colonies. What might happen is that emerge in the countries that are liberating themselves a new elite of native exploiters who then ally with the former colonial powers to continue setting up the same kinds of extraction of wealth as existed before and that's

exactly what by and large has happened right and that's why we need to understand that relationship between anti-colonialism and anti-capulism right like anti-clonialism is not about simply you know some kind of it's not purely a political process of who's in government, nor is it purely a cultural process of, you know, somehow getting rid of certain attitudes of superiority and so on. But it is about the distribution of wealth, right, and where that wealth comes from and who gets it, right? And that's, and that's why we're not in a post-colonial world. We're in a, we're in a neo-colonial world where those, those things have just found new ways to work. Now, and the other thing that

I think, you know, the key thing that we can learn from Fanon who, you know, whose work, I think, is so powerful in predicting so much of our current kind of global situation is that, you know, that the way that wealth is extracted, right, is not derived. So the first point is it's not derived from some kind of psychological sense of superiority. Like we're saying before, it's not about individual attitude. It's not as he puts it at a mental disposition or psychological flaw. It's an economic system, right? And the attitudes come afterwards. And they, as you said, the cause and effect is the other way around. And Fanon's very good at explaining that.

But the other thing is, so where is liberation going to come from? if it's not going to come from ruling elites in colonized countries that are vulnerable to being co-opted and becoming collaborators of imperialism, right? Well, he doesn't think it's simply a matter also of saying, well, you know, the working classes in different countries can simply come together and unite in that way that, you know, Orthodox Marxism hoped for, you know, at the beginning of the 20th century, right? clearly he doesn't you know the prospects of that happening are are very low given you know what him and you know a whole host of other things like CLR James like Du Bois have pointed out about and Lenin in fact as well you know have pointed out about the ways that imperialism can use a portion of the wealth that it's generating through its exploitation of other parts of the world to essentially buy a workers in the imperialist countries, right? Perhaps not to completely buy them off, but to cushion the antagonism between workers and capitalists within a country like Britain

or the United States, right? And so the... And that's where the question of racism connects very directly to the question of imperialism, because the story that's, you know, that's being offered to white workers in the West, you know, since the late 19th century, is you are because of your whiteness you're entitled to certain privileges that other

workers in other parts of the world are not entitled to right and that's not just a story that's told it's that as well but it's also actual differences in in income right and and so that has been you know one of the keys to how capitalism has been able to sustain itself a hundred years after its end was predicted, right? So, so, and when we come to the present day, that relationship is still very much in place, even though it takes different forms from what it took a hundred years ago. And it's, you know, we are dealing right now with a situation where,

you know, there is a kind of revolution. going on in the world that we're not really even grasping, right? That's been building for decades, which is the revolution that involves the gradual kind of weakening of the power of the West. While the West is still dominant

and still an imperialist power, its power is weakening, right? Its ability to control the kind of global system in the way it used to is as diminished, right? And as a result, precisely of anti-colonial struggle.

and anti-imperialist strums, right? And so you have most of the world's population who are trying to think about how do we build a different world from the world that Europeans have created, right? And the question of whether that world will, what would be the role of capitalism in that world would it even exist is central, right?

Now, in that conversation, you know, what's happening is, is that because of that sort of erosion of a certain kind of power while still being dominant for the West, is having various knock-on effects in the West, right? In terms of, you know, clearly one of the things that's happened in the United States over the last couple of decades is that the situation of the working class in the United States has been weakened quite dramatically through a process of neoliberalization,

which involves the capacity to, you know, to relocate production to other parts of the world, right, where labor is cheaper, right? And so far as China's concerned, that has led to a kind of process of industrialization in China, which has given China a different kind of bargaining power in the global system, right? Now, so then the question is, is how does that register culturally and politically in the United States in all kinds of ways? But one of the ways it registers is we have to, we, we, we end up with stories about new kinds of threats that are racialized stories, right? Like we, you know, when Trump talked about, um, shithole countries, right, talking, he's articulating and making explicit kind of what's implicit in, in a whole kind of political culture, which is, um, you know, certain countries are just poorer and people are struggling and hungry there, um, because of their, um, because of their, inability to develop, their cultural failure, right? They lack the right kind of entrepreneurial values or the right kind of frift or they're too

communal in their culture and not individually acquisitive, whatever formulation you want. These don't come from Trump. These come from the mainstream of neoliberal thinking over the last, you know, 50 years, right? And so we've, and so that's a cultural version of racism, right, that becomes a way to legitimize a system of global inequality that means. that millions of people every year die of hunger and disease

because of impropriism, essentially, right? It has to be justified and the more that people challenge it, the more that those justifications will be mobilised, the more we'll see that kind of racism, that cultural form racism mobilised, right?

And, you know, we're going to see this, especially around the question of climate, right, which is a question that is all about imperialism because it's not, I mean, I think people understand this that, you know, the biggest impacts of climate change are going to be in sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia in terms of like entire regions of the world becoming unlivable because of heat or flooding, destroying crops and so on. But the, you know, the carbon that's put in the atmosphere, like there's, you know, something like 50 times, if you're living in a suburban home in the United States, you're putting 50 times more carbon into the atmosphere than, you know, than someone who's a fisherman in Bangladesh. Right. So, you know, that's another aspect of imperialist inequality and, and, and, and, um, mass killing. Um, so, you know, it's not like people in Bangladesh are going to just sit back and say, I guess we, I guess we're just born in the wrong country, right? Not anymore. Not in the 21st century. You know, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to, one of the ways they fight back is to, is to, is to demand the right to move to other places, right? It's where they, where they can perhaps have a sustainable life. And then we build borders to stop them. Right. But that's a site of political struggle.

And we're going to have to confront, you know, the challenge for the, for the left in the country like the United States is we haven't even begun to think about this stuff, right? How do we relate to that struggle of Bangladeshi is trying to bring about this transformation, right? We haven't even begun to have that conversation, really. And it's difficult because the reality is it's very hard to mobilize people in the United States to think about anti-imperialism in that way. because there are you know there are certain kinds of short-term I don't think that they're deep interest but there are short-term interest that American workers would have and it actually keeping you know keeping the system as it is so you know this is challenging basically yeah a lot of things that I want to say about what you have

but to try to keep it short I have just a couple of quick notes the first ones are episode suggestions for listeners who want to find out more so of course you were talking quite a bit about Wretched of the Earth. Listeners, you should be aware that Red Menace has a three-part series on Ratchet of the Earth, Francinandan's Wretched of the Earth. So if you want to hear Brett and Alice talking about Wretched of the Earth, you should go and check out that three-part series. It's really excellent.

I can find that on the Red Menace feed. Also, I know that we on Gorilla History in the past, I don't remember if it's a Patreon exclusive or if we unlocked it at some point. We did a film review of Concerning Violence, which is a documentary that's based off of the opening chapter. Well, I shouldn't say based off. It's inspired by the opening chapter of a wretched of the earth. And it's a really good documentary. And, you know, we have some criticisms. We have some praise. So go and check that out. But then also the second kind of set of recommendations is we're talking about imperialism and climate change, the kind of last

point that you were making there, everyone, we have a lot of episodes listeners that focus pretty heavily on this topic. So I'm just going to list some names of episodes that we've done. done that touch on this topic. And if you're interested in any of those, you can just type them into Google and I'm sure that they'll come up. They're going to be in the guerrilla history feed. So recently we had our climate breakdown, sovereignty, and the Anthropocene Intelligence briefing.

We have a history of the world in Seven Cheap Things with Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel, world ecology and the capitalists scene with Jason W. Moore. Shut down Red Hill, naval pollution disaster with Mikey from the Oahu water protectors, Social Estates and the Environment with Salvatore Engel de Morrow, a top 26 dispatch with B.J. Prashad and Chris Saltmarsh and Eco-Despairor, Revolutionary Optimism

and the Fight for the Future, which was a two-part intelligence briefing that we had. So a lot of episodes that focus on that topic. But the last note that I want to make, and I do apologize for being lengthy here before I even let it on go in with this question, is that one other thing that you mentioned

the room, which is that a lot of people don't appreciate that imperialism is an ongoing issue. You know, people think imperialism was something from the early to mid-20th century, but now we're kind of beyond that or that, you know, the colonial era is done and therefore, you know, that's completely gone without thinking about neo-colonial relations. It's actually even worse than that in most places. And not only do they think that this era is done, but in many places they're proud of that legacy. So there was a U-Gub survey that came out in 2019 that surveyed several countries,

but I'm just going to focus on Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium for a moment. In all of these countries, far more people are proud of their empire than they are ashamed of it. So the question was explicitly, was your country's empire something to be more proud of, neither more proud or ashamed of

or something to be more ashamed of? And in Britain, we see 31, 32% of people are more proud of it, whereas only 19% are more ashamed of that. And the rest say that, you know, neither more proud or ashamed of it, which is just a cop out of saying, I don't want to say that I'm proud of my empire. But, you know, I'm not actually that ashamed of it. It's worse in the Netherlands, a full 50% of respondents in the survey in the Netherlands are more proud of their empire. only 6% are more ashamed of it. 6% of respondents are more ashamed of their empire in the Netherlands than proud of it. Belgium, only 22% are more proud of it, but a similar number for ashamed of it.

22%, 22%. So in these countries, not only has the thinking in the popular consciousness been that, okay, well, imperialism and colonialism is a relic of the past, Of course, the vast, vast majority of the respondents of this survey would say that that was a legacy of the past and not an ongoing reality of the present. But in each of these countries, more individuals are actually proud of that legacy than are ashamed of it, which is an entirely separate problem. Then, you know, acknowledging the reality that this is still an ongoing problem, even taking that aside, these individuals think that it's something. to be proud of. And there was separate questions that were asked about whether or not the colonialism that these countries practiced did more good or more harm to the countries

that were colonized, you know, whether the countries that were colonized are better off as a result of the colonialism. And again, in most of these countries that were surveyed, particularly Britain and the Netherlands, more respondents said that the countries that were colonized were better off for being colonized. Belgium, a little bit different, that more people thought that they were neither better off nor worse off. But in the Netherlands and Britain, people think that these countries are better off as a result of colonialism. So, you know, there's multiple struggles here that we have to do when we're grappling with the, with history and the ongoing reality of the present, and that most people don't understand that there is a present to these

questions of colonialism and imperialism. I mean, that's one problem. The other problem is that in addition to that, in many of these colonial and imperial countries, people not only don't understand that it's an ongoing reality, but they're proud of that legacy. And that's an entirely separate problem and one that's probably even more difficult to grapple with and say, hey, you know, this is not only not something to be proud of, but this is something that continues to reverberate today and continues to feed into the numerous problems that we have, not only within their country, but globally, particularly within the global south. So that's my other note.

I'll turn it over to you. I know that I've laid a lot of dispar threads out there. Well, yeah, maybe Arun would like to respond. Oh, go ahead, of course. So, yeah, I mean, so let me just say quickly then. You know, you're absolutely right. And I think that the, you know, people are echoing back in these opinion polls, what they've been told in school and what they've been told in, you know,

in the kind of broader kind of official culture of a kind of country like Britain or the Netherlands, right? What would it mean to say that you were ashamed of that history in a country like Britain, right? It would mean that you lose the central story that Britain tells itself about what it is, right? I mean, Britain was formed. You know, Britain is not this ancient, you know, kind of nation that goes back millennia, right? Britishness was created as an imperial identity in, you know, know, the 18th century, right? And so

if you remove the imperial story of Britain as a background to what Britain is, then you're left with a question of what else could it be, right? What else, what would be the alternative story, right? You're left with a vacuum, right? Because there is no other kind of candidate for what would fill that gap, right? Just because

the British Empire is what Britain was, right? Britain's problem since the end of the British Empire, the formal British Empire, right, is, well, what is Britain and doesn't have an answer to that question, right? So I think, I think there's a sort of structural reason why you end up, and the same would be true, to be honest, the same would be true of the Netherlands or Belgium, right, or France, right? There's a structural reason why you end up with, even in the face of, you know, obviously these people who say that they're proud of the British Empire are not by and large unaware of at these. some of the atrocities are not unaware that the British Empire it was involved in the slave trade, right? But there's a kind of perhaps, you know, there's an impulse to cling to the story that there's something positive nevertheless about the British Empire because otherwise some very difficult questions starts to arise, right, about today, about what is Britain today, right? And so you say, yes, there was the slave trade that Britain did, but then also we abolished the slave trade, right? So all good. You know, like the acquit by Eric Williams in the official history books of Britain, it's presented as if the purpose of creating the slave trade was precisely so that then it could be heroically abolished, right? So, you know, that's really how it works, right? Even today in Britain. And, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, I mean, the Netherlands hasn't even is behind Britain on this in even beginning to grapple with its history

of the slave trade and its history of colonialism in, you know, in Suriname and Indonesia and all the histories of atrocities that involved, right? So, and of course the other thing here is if you begin to acknowledge, you know, things that happened in relatively recent past, right?

Like, you know, the 1950s, Britain was carrying out, you know, torture and rape and massacres in Kenya, in Malaya and so on, they survive, they're still alive, right? And this perpetrator is still alive, living comfortable lives, you know, in the, in the leafy areas surrounding London, right? Retired military officers and so on, right? So if you say, well, actually, that was a crime against humanity, what we did in Kenya or in Malaya, or in countless other places, right, in the 1950s, 1960s, then, okay, well, what about some accountability for that? You know, that's the next question is, shouldn't someone be in prison for that?

Shouldn't, you know, shouldn't there be massive amounts of money being transferred to compensate victim communities and so on, right? It starts to get pretty complicated pretty quickly, right? So let's stay in the comfort zone of, yeah, we did some bad things, but, you know, also some good things, right? So all fine, all fine. Yeah, that reminds me of a kind of popular turn in British Imperial history during the era of the global war on terror. by people like Neil Ferguson, you know, propagating popularly and academically the idea that there was a liberal British empire. And sure, there were some like, you know, especially under the East India Company, some transgressions and so on. But, you know, when it came under, you know,

these reformist approaches, there actually was a lot of investment and these countries, you know, improved so much under liberal empire, almost as a recipe, of course, that the United States now had to take up that same white man's burden and actually embrace its post-World War II status as an empire, as if it hadn't, but now it needed to consciously actually begin in and that the global war on terrorism was the venue and the opportunity for exactly those wars in Iraq and so on that would help remake the world, you know, progressively. So yeah, there's just this kind of long history. This is why I think these historical narratives that you've been talking about and discussing in the book are also so important.

The stakes that are involved in how we understand these histories have, you know, serious implications for, you know, contemporary situation. But I wanted to ask you about some other kind of core chapters in this book. And, you know, and really I'll actually maybe to have you expand a little bit on, you know, this kind of question of imperialism, but about your idea, really about racial capitalism, because I think one thing that you're very keen on doing and building on that scholarship of people like Eric Williams and, of course, Robinson, you know, who really coined that kind of phrase, you know, what are the domestic kind of consequences, how this gets, you know, how does racial

capitalism work when it gets, when this kind of imperialism is imported into, say, the United States and how does it, you know, kind of reframe, you know, politics. And particularly I'm interested here in your critique that seems to run through this of social democracy, you know, when taken in this isolation, which is, you know, a lot of people who don't want to engage the consequences of empire. And the connections between domestic racism and imperial racism, you know, then you can't see they frame a kind of domestic politics that I think really misses how racial capitalism really works. And so I wanted maybe you to give us a sense of that. And if it takes you to also talking about how this has been reframed and repackaged in the neoliberal era and globalization, that would be great too. But we could ask that as a separate point, but it seems very connected. So yeah, so I think, you know, so you kind of hear this term racial capitalism a lot over the last few years, right, on the left. And, and I think it's not always been clear what people mean by it. One of the things I try and do in the book is to try and, you know, go through some of the people who, you know, so the term actually comes out of debates in South Africa about the relationship between apartheid and capitalism, right? And so I go through some of that history of where, um, of those things. because people like Neville Alexander and others who were trying to think about how apartheid fits into the picture of capitalism and come up with this concept of racial capitalism to answer that. And then, you know, other thinkers like Cedric Robinson who pick up the idea subsequently. But I think, you know, for me, the central sort of idea here is, you know, on, so the, if you've, if you've read, if you've read the Communist Manifesto, right, there's this idea in the Communist manifesto, you know, where capitalism is presented as this as this homogenizing force right that you know

battered as a phrase is it bashed down Chinese all Chinese wars and kind of kind of you know kind of spreads around the world turning everything into into the same structure of where the relationship to in capitalist and workers is always going to be the same every right in the end that's it that's its tendency right and in the and and part of that is this is a kind of liberation as well because he says, you know, ancient and venerable, they say, I should say Marx and Engels both say, you know, ancient and venerable prejudice is a kind of pushed away

and we get a kind of picture of this kind of universal clash between workers everywhere and capitalists everywhere, right? Now, you know, one of the things that I think is useful about the term racial capitalism is that it makes that story, it gives us a bit more complexity to that story, that's important politically because what we what I think we're saying when we talk about racial capitalism is that in fact there isn't that homogenizing tendency. In fact, the picture of what labor looks like around the world is incredibly heterogeneous. And there are all kinds of

different relationships between different categories of worker and capital. So in the kind of classic picture of what an industrial working class looks like, say in, you know, in Manchester, England, in the heyday of, you know, of industrial capitalism is, you know,

people who have been expelled forcibly from the land that would have sustained them previously or their ancestors previously. And so they have nothing to sell but their labour. And then they enter into a relationship with capitalists to, you know, because they have no other choice,

to give their labour a certain amount of time in return for a wage, and that wage then is what they use to consume, what they need to survive, right? And that's the story, right? Now, that is a story for a minority of work at any point in the history of capitalism, and that's not a majority story, right? The other categories that you have to put alongside that are things like slaves, things like indentured workers, right? None of whom are relating to capitalism in the same way.

They're not getting, they're not waged workers in the same way, right? And, you know, you can get at least can be extended quite a lot. Obviously, you want to add in housewives as one of the categories of labor as well that is not waged labor, right? So you get this picture of a much more differentiated kind of working class. Well, and even gig economy now, you know, we're framed as wage.

It's a different kind of precise relation. Right. And so my argument is that is that the reason that we have racism in its modern form, like it probably existed in some kind of other forms in, you know, pre-capitalist periods. I don't think that historical debate about whether racism

only begins with capitalism or it exists before is actually it's relevant to understanding racism as it is often presented as, right? If it did exist before, capitalism took it up and started to use it in new ways. And And so what happens is that racism becomes the way that capitalism can organize a differentiated workforce, right?

It can say that, well, the reason, you know, although we tell our official story of capitalism as this liberal transaction between two individuals, the worker and the capitalist, and both are trading as equals and with certain freedoms, and it just so happens that the capitalist ends up profiting in this way from getting something from the worker, which is. who's or her labor power and that's just but essentially we're dealing with you know this kind of freely contracting individuals um you know that's the official story that capitalism has told itself since adam smith and so on right um well then what about these plantations in alabama where no one's free to contract anything because they are literally capital that belongs to someone else

they're owned by the slaves are owned by someone else oh well that's why we need something like racism to come in and say, well, yes, but they aren't human. They don't, they aren't going to be part of the standard capitalist story of individuals with certain freedoms and so on, right? So, so, you know, and that's the, that's the sort of obvious example. But it's exactly the same thing when we say, well, how come, you know, we've got sweatshops of immigrant workers without, you know, the rights to organize and the rights to demand better wages and debt, better conditions and so on, you know, in a country like the United States or, we've got super exploited workers in other parts of the world.

Well, essentially, we make some kind of racial, cultural argument as to why that is legitimate, right? That's the same thing. So it might not be that, you know, it's always going to be racism that does that. It could be, you know, in a country like India, it's like ideas of caste and so on have been appropriated by capitalism to provide the same kind of justificatory role, but you need some kind of social differentiation to, to, as essential to capitalism. because capitalism can never universalize that relationship between the waged worker

in that kind of classic picture and the capitalists. There's just no way that capitalism can do that. It just doesn't have the resources and the capacity to do that. So you're always going to have some kind of social differentiation. Racism has been the main way that that's been done in the West. And because the West has then created the global system as a whole, racism is central to that overall system, even if in particular places, you know, other forms of social differentiation become important and like caste.

So, you know, that's my theory. That's what I think racial capitalism is about. I think, you know, I think Stuart Hall in the 70s was arguing something very similar. Sidde Robinson goes in a slight different direction. We don't need to get into. But, and so because of that, you know, that enables then us to have a tool to understand things in the 20th century that are politically important, right? So, for example, when we think about social democracy, as you asked about, then when you think about social democracy like the think about um you know in britain the the kind of

1945 labor government um which you know has this kind of heroic standing in in in the british left by and large um for good reason to some extent you know like the government that created the national health care you know massive public housing programs um you know uh education for everyone cradle to grave welfare state so that you have this kind of safety net right um uh actually a very attractive picture of what we'd love to have today. But the kind of what talking about racial capitalism enables

us to add to that picture is some problems of it, one of which is that welfare state is made possible by the wealth that Britain has extracted through colonialism. And as people in

the Caribbean and in India and in in Africa is starting to mobilize in mass movements through the 20th century, right? At the very same time that Britain's creating the welfare state to kind of as, you know, the welfare state has been created as a response to the demands of labor in Britain, right? And it's a way of stabilizing capitalism within Britain by conceding a whole load of stuff to the labor movement in Britain. But as people involved in mass movements in other parts of the British Empire,

are also doing the same stuff, to demand housing and healthcare and education and so on, whereas in Britain they're offered the World First Day, in other parts of the British Empire, they're offered military suppression to stop them being able to successfully make those demands, right? Like, you know, the same Labour government that gives us the National Health Service sends in the military into the Caribbean and other places when trade union is there are demanding, you know, their rights.

so, you know, and so a part of the story that the British ruling class tells its working class population in Britain is you are special and that's why you are entitled to these extra privileges and that's because you're white, right? And so, you know, so that becomes part of the story in Britain. And there's a similar story in the United States in particular with the New Deal in the way that it kind of embraces a kind of racial segregation where, you know, You know, so for example, it doesn't, so that the New Deal provisions for labour rights don't cover agricultural workers because they're largely black and Mexican, you know. It doesn't cover domestic workers because domestic workers are largely black women and Mexican women and so on, right? And so those categories of non-white people are excluded from the provisions of the New Deal and racial segregation is entrenched, right? And then when we come up to thinking about, you know, the neoliberal transformation that then takes that welfare state in a country like the United States or the UK, obviously to a lesser extent it exists in the United States, but to some extent it did. And then, and then says, you know, we want to replace this with a new kind of idea of capitalism based on a kind of market-based society. we don't think now that we've kind of weakened the working class mobilizations that actually made us have to create the welfare state now we can kind of actually pull back from that because they've been demobilized we don't need to give them that anymore and so we can kind of have this counter revolution right that's what yeah that's one strand of neoliberal thinking right is the white working class in in the united states or in europe is weakened now so we can kind of give up on these on these white privileges that we that we provided with the welfare state to them right um But there's another part of what's going on with the neoliberal transformation,

which is a, and this is the bit that's left out of the standard story from the likes of, you know, people like David Harvey and Wendy Brown and so on, the kind of main theorist of neoliberalism, right? What's left out is if you look at the neoliberal thinkers who are, you know, trying to assess where they go politically in the 60s and 70s and so on, they're looking at the world and they're not just seeing you know the need to

go after the organized labour in the United States and Europe and weaken them in order to move to more market society they're also equally focused on the black liberation movement they were equally focused on

you know this kind of huge wave of anti-clonial struggles that transforms the world through 1940s to the 1970s which they see as leading to a kind of demand for a global redistribution of wealth, right? So they're already, like, deeply miserable about the fact that the welfare state is a kind of redistribution of wealth within a single nation. And they're now looking at, you know, movements in Tanzania and Jamaica and so on, where people are starting to, by the early 70s especially, are starting to demand a global redistribution of wealth. So it's not just like National Health Service for Works in Britain, national health service provided for the whole. world by the wealthy nations, right? And that's their real, that's, you know, I mean, that's, that's

driving them crazy, right? And so, um, uh, part of the neoliberal transformation is to weaken the working classes in those wealthy countries, but it's also then to go after these own movements, right? And, um, and, you know, so that's the kind of political context and then within which day in the 1980s, is you get things like the structural adjustment programs being rolled out through the IMF and the World Bank and so on to bring about a, a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, So, you know, a large part of what they're thinking about there is that in countries in Africa, in South Asia, in the Caribbean, and so on, the fundamental problem for the neoliberals, as they see, is a cultural problem, right? They believe that these people are not able to adapt culturally to a neoliberal market society, right? And therefore, violence is necessary in order to force them to adapt.

they don't say okay well I guess we're not wanted over there we'll leave them alone they they say right because for them neoliberalism means universally around the world a global neoliberal market society right and so we're going to have to use violence right and they're fairly explicit about this and so you know that's what the structural adjustment programs are in part about is about using the leverage of debt that these global financial institutions have to force governments in countries in Africa and so on to what they think of as decommunalize their people, make their people less collective in their thinking and more I just need to think about my own personal acquisition of wealth, right?

And how can I can maximize my individual benefits rather than like some broader entity, whether it's an extended family or a whole society or even humanity as a whole, right? So that's a, you know, so again, we get one of these political projects that aims at the transformation of a culture, right, in these ways that connect battle we're talking about before with the war on terror with solitary confinement and so on central to the neoliberal project and that's a racial project because their understanding of culture is not that culture is something that's dynamic and constantly evolving and constantly moving which is what it is but as something that for certain people is fixed in this way that um that looks very much like race

right like a fixed set of um dispositions to certain kinds of behavior right and therefore if it's fixed and you want to change that behavior, the only way is coercion, right? And that's why neoliberalism is such a violent project, the more you move away from white people to other groups of people, whether that's domestically in a country like the United States, you know, the violence

of mass incarceration, the violence of broken windows policing, directed in particular of black people. It's partly, it's a neoliberal project because it's about saying these are these populations that for cultural reasons cannot be integrated into a neoliberal project. They need force fully to be removed from the

streets, right? And, you know, neoliberal things like the Manhattan Institute are explicit that is what they're thinking. You know, it's not hidden. It's not a secret conspiracy here. And then, you know, as we were saying before, the wars on terror, the wars and drugs are all part of this same stuff. And of course, the border regimes, right? Designed precisely to enable neoliberal capitalism to manage the kinds of workforces that are allowed into certain

places and the ones that aren't on a set of cultural assumptions right a racially racial cultural assumptions about what kinds of workers are suitable for what kinds of work and what what kinds of people have to be completely excluded and banished to to be surplus populations right subject to just pure violence and and and and we constantly tell racial stories about all of this to legitimize it yeah yeah i mean i think brett might want to follow up with some of those um specific dimensions of the borders and military ventures that you're discussing here as the consequences of neoliberalism. But one quick follow-up was it was interesting that you pointed out and mentioned some

of the theorists of neoliberalism looking at it from a kind of political economy, you know, Marxist critique of the globalization. process and neoliberal economics like David Harvey and so on, who do seem to discount the continuation of imperialism and the role that, you know, these military interventions and a lot of what you end up talking about in your last few chapters, how that has to be integrated into what is otherwise seen as like a new, you know, kind of form of organized. of labor that they're very interested in discussing, it seems so analogous to me to the way in which you started in some sense with the Eurocentric, eccentric sort of frame under which

Marxist theory was first developed and how some of these anti-colonial thinkers and people from the Caribbean who we've been talking about, as well as South Asian, Marxist intellectuals who contributed to this critique of imperialism needed to be integrated to really see the way in which global capitalism was operating and, you know, chart some sort of pathway of a more productive revolutionary process and practice that would, you know, integrate these freedom struggles in the colonies with, you know, workers in the imperial core. It seems like that's exactly the same kind of ellipsies. And, you know, just. not seeing that kind of side of things operating. And so I just wondered if you had any further just to say about the, you know, kind of the limitations of some of these kinds of critiques of neoliberalism that have come from, you know, our Marxist colleagues and comrades, but that they're not, you know, seeing some of the picture here. And that if it, if it's integrated, then it looks a little bit differently. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more. If you have anything more substance, if you want to say, you just mentioned, you know,

your problem with some of these theorists. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that if you could. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I mean, you know, David Harvey is a, you know, he's a Marxist. It's a family dispute, you know, he's a brother that I'm disagreeing with on something, right? And so he's, you know, I think his work's been really important, you know, politically for all kinds of reasons. I just think he's incomplete, you know, like the story he tells about neoliberalism, this really powerful story that I think has been kind of become the kind of just default story

of the left in the United States, you know, like the story that David Harvey tells of what neoliberalism was about, incredibly influential, but it's incomplete, right? And so, you know, I think our role is, you know, I mean, I don't think it's the same kind of problem that, you know, that we had, you know, one of the other, the sort of things I write about in the, in the book is, you know, the kind of the politics of race in the, in the second international in the early 20th century, like the Stuttgart, Stuttgart conference in Germany in the early 20th century, where, you know, where you have, oh, yeah, I was, you know, like trade, you know, labor leaders turning up at, you know, at an internationalist, socialist, socialist conference,

you know, basically doing a kind of racist stand-up comedy routine, you know, like a, so So, you know, we're not, that's different. You know, this is not just a straight line to David Harvey. David Harvey's, you know, doing something very different. So it's just, it's story's incomplete, you know, the story's incomplete. And so what does it mean to add to this story? Well, it does it, I think, you know, so one of the consequences politically of adding in this other strand to the story is

that we see a whole load of people struggling in ways that, that are going to be incredibly useful for our political projects of getting rid of capitalism that we wouldn't otherwise get to see and work with because if you think that the story around

anti-capitalism is simply a story of how do we bring wage workers together to be the force that overfroes capitalism then you're missing out on people who aren't wage workers but are also fighting capitalism and doing so in ways that don't fit that simple conventional story

but nevertheless are going to be needed to bring it down because most of the world's population is getting you know the central if you want to kind of think about what is the centre of where the antagonism against capitalism is in the world today. It's actually not like industrial workers getting a wage. It's about people who would actually like the opportunity to be exploited as industrial workers with a wage

but are simply being put on it on a global. scrap heap and force to survive in whatever way they can and not allowed to build alternative systems by themselves outside of capitalism because of the violence is deployed to prevent that from happening. And so they're struggling in a different way. They can't withdraw their labour to have some leverage over capitalism. They have to build something else, right? And find some other ways to fight. And they're doing it in all kinds of ways and getting it wrong in lots of ways and trying things and those things aren't working but yeah the landless you know the landest movement in Brazil for example the building communities right that have a certain kind of subsistence and

self-sufficiency that's one way of thinking about what this way forward might be it's not going to be one thing it's going to be like how do we think about how that kind of project in somewhere like Brazil that is trying to say if we organize and have some capacity for self-defense against the the military violence that might be deployed against maybe we can build our own economy here and that can be the start of something because capitalism doesn't let us in any way, right? But it's going to be a question of how do we think about integrating that kind of political project

with the workers who may, you know, who still could go on strike and use their power even in Brazil or another country, you know, like an imperialist country like United States, right? Like how do we coordinate that? How do we think about, and if we want to answer those questions, we'd go back to the history, right? of, you know, thinkers like MN Roy and CLR James.

So we're exactly thinking about this exact question of, like, what does it look like for there to be a coordinated strike against capitalism with an anti-colonial struggle in one place and a, you know, a waged worker struggling in another place and a women struggle in another place and so on, right? Like, how do you coordinate that? For them, it's obviously an ambitious thing. For us, it should be a bit easier with our, you know, level of communication now, you know.

So, but we have to start having those conversations and we're not going to get to them. if we are sucked into this idea that it's all about the wage workers and just that is the only force that we have that can strike against capitalism, right? And so, and the other thing is, is if we ignore that other side to it, we miss out on the most important political victories that we have had, right, you know, in the recent past. Because the neoliberal story that you get from David Harvey is a story of defeat essentially, right? It's a story of how this partial set of gains that the left got in the middle of the 20th century was lost, right? And it leaves us,

it leaves us feeling pretty bereft, right? But actually, alongside that, you know, there is another story of, you know, of all kinds of movements in the third world, bringing about a total transformation, right, of the world. With all the limitations and, you know, and caveats around neo-colonism that we've talked about. But nevertheless, a, you know, a huge transformation that is actually much more recent than, you know, where you'd have to go back to a point of really significant victories for, for labor movements in the United States or Europe. You can actually, you know, that's much more recent in the third world. You know, like the story of social revolutions is, in the last hundred years, is that, is that, yes,

you know, there's 1917 in Russia a semi-industrialized country, perhaps, but then, you know, subsequently to that, essentially the social revolutions are happening in countries that are predominantly peasant-based societies in the third world, right? And so that gets, we don't have, if that's not seen as a resource for us to draw on and there's some kind of legacy of victories, then we're missing a trick. You know, I don't think we can replicate those kind of revolutions today in the same way. We have to come up with new ways of doing it. But we have a legacy there to draw on, right? And lessons that come out of that, you know, even something like the Grenada revolution in 1982, you know, there's a,

there's something inspiring about in 1982, like a bunch of black power radicals, like over, you know, like basically overthrowing a pro-U.S. regime and trying to create a socialist society with a kind of black power politics as well in the 1980s, you know. And obviously, we know what happens to it. It gets, it gets destroyed by the U.S. military, but nevertheless, There's something there to look at and say, well, what was, you know, what was the strategy? How can we learn from that? How can we build on that? Wasn't that a wage worker strategy?

So that, you know, I think that's why it's so important. Yeah, one quick note before Brett Hobson, since you mentioned Grenada, this is something that Americans never really think about in terms of what Grenada means as a source of inspiration. But also, they don't grapple with the fact that this was another revolutionary movement that was put down by the United States. And the reason I want to make a quick note of this is just to lay out a little bit of context, I come from a little nothing town, 6,000 people total in the town. And between my town and the neighboring town, there's about 13,000 people.

So, I mean, you can understand, I come from the forest. And the house that I grew up in is kind of on a ski hill, going up a ski hill towards the ski jump at the top of it. And right next to the ski jump, I know this doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, but I promise it will. Okay. So at the ski jump, there's the ski jump that, you know, they have the Intercontinental Cup ski jumping contest at every year. And right next to it, there is a veterans memorial, big giant, huge American flag with placards of the names of veterans from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I come from that had, you know, served in various conflicts. One of the conflicts that is highlighted with its own big stone pillar is the marine action in Grenada.

Most Americans don't even know that there was an action in Grenada. And here they are memorializing this egregious act of the United States military going in and overthrowing a revolutionary movement in a small Caribbean nation. And, like, that's the only legacy of that within the consciousness of the United States is, hey, we have some veterans that served in this. Like, think about, you know, the heroism, the heroism of these American veterans who are going into, you know, a place where Americans, 99% of them could not point to it on a math, but probably at least 90% of them have never even heard of it.

But they see that there was veterans that served there and they want to memorialize them. So, yeah, it's not really here nor there. It's just, you know, every time I think of Grenada, the two things that go through my mind are, as you mentioned, it should be a source of inspiration. But then also thinking even in a tiny nothing area, like the one where I grew up, I mean, like our main industry is forestry and snowplows. I'm literally not joking, like the two main industries there. And the old industry was mining, but those mines have shut down. So now it's just forestry and snowplows that we make. we still have a pillar memorializing the marine action in Grenada at, you know, one of the main

congregating points in the town. It's, it's crazy. Anyway, sorry for that distraction. It's just, you know, something that always gets under my skin. And my mom, I'm sure if she hears this, will roll her eyes because every time we go for a walk past there, I'm always ranting and raving about it. Look at this. Look at how egregious this is. But anyway, yeah, so we want to be respectful of your time here and sort of zoom in towards the closing of this wonderful conversation. I have so many notes, things I could continue to say. We were talking about the border a little bit earlier, and Governor Greg Abbott's sort of saw-like death machines over the Rio Grande, these pro-life politicians being so willing to slaughter families searching for a better life. That's going to intensify

under climate change. The weaponization, I think one of the hallmarks, and this is a horse I like to be quite often, but one of the hallmarks of the neoliberal era is the sort of co-option by liberal elites of the language of anti-racism and inclusivity and identity politics and the weaponization of that against actual legalitarians, you know, who are anti-imperialist and have a class politic. And I think we'll continue to see elements of that. I mean, we just had on a guest talking about Jeremy Corbyn and the slanders of anti-Semitism wielded against him. We know about the Obama and the Bernie bros, and I think this is going to sort of continue. But all of that aside, we can get to those points in different episodes, and I've certainly talked about them before.

But I did want to give you a chance to sort of summarize your arguments in the concluding chapter, a darker red, where the whole text is sort of brought to a pinnacle, and just sort of, yeah, just conclude with us what your conclusions are in the text and let us know how you wrap up the book. Yeah, so, you know, so I think the one, you know, one thing I wanted to say in the conclusion of the book is kind of come back to some of the questions around diversity that, like, run through the book, right? And the, so I think, you know, the key point really is that, is that diversity as this kind of form of liberal anti-racism, you know, that is about putting, making, making our, like, leading institutions look like they match the demographics of the population in their leadership

and thinking about how you know different groups demographically are represented in terms of cultural production and so on movies and so on. You know, all of that is is firstly that derives directly from the kind

of liberal tradition that I've been talking about the idea is that it's some sort of educational pedagogical kind of value in that sort of representational politics, right? Because the assumption is that there's individual attitudes that need to be changed rather than structures. But that it's a very precarious kind of thing for that kind of diversity, that liberal diversity politics to be dominant. Because if your structures are structures of racial capitalism, then there's always this way that, you know, rather than people being influenced

in their opinions and shapes in their opinions by the sort of official talk of diversity, there's every chance that they also actually just read off from the structures what they're supposed to think about these questions and decide that there really is this dangerous, you know, threat of, you know, what Dubai schools the dark proletariat, right? And we really do need the borders and we really do need the police and so on to keep us safe from these threats, right? And so there's this kind of weird tension in the way that that sort of liberal diversity of politics works. it's a you know because it's based on this contradiction that it doesn't correspond to the reality of the racial capitalist society we live in but then in terms of you know where we end up in terms of thinking about our movements and how we struggle here um i think um you know

wait so so kind of kind of what we were just talking about we're going to have to think about how we we're not in a position anymore where we're going to have um a kind of of, you know, universal kind of working class as our revolutionary agent that gets rid of capitalism, right? It's going to be about how do all kinds of differently positioned constituencies find ways to coordinate in a revolutionary strump, right? Now, in order for that to happen, we need an analysis that reflects that racially differentiating form of capitalism that we actually live in, right? And so that's the first thing. first thing. And that means that we also have to get rid of the idea that what racism is today

is some kind of legacy of the past. It's just some kind of hangover from a past where where racism was much more explicit and overt and we were just kind of left with the sort of like aftermath of that just kind of being passed down almost by default. Whereas actually the reality of what we're dealing with is actual structures that are constantly being reproduced by, ruling elites because they require racism to uphold the very structures that they are invested in in defending and maintaining, right? So racism is constantly being reproduced and we miss that if we just rely on some idea of the legacy. I think all the debates about the legacy of racism like 16, 19, all that. In the end, I mean, they're valuable to the extent that they

enable us to demolish certain kind of, you know, kind of justifying. histories and so on, but beyond that, they don't really tell us much about what racism is today, right? So, and so then, you know, I think the question, you know, the sort of questions that come up in movements today around race and around identity and so on, right? So we've, you know, we've kind of gone into this discussion saying that, you know, there's these structures and just changing individuals isn't going to change a structure. We need to focus on structures. Okay, obviously next question, how do you change your structures then? Well, you change your structures not for educating individuals about the prejudice, but for building collectives, right?

That groups of people who are committed to each other and working together to act in a kind of disciplined way, and by coming together as a body in that way, have some kind of collective power that is greater than their power as individuals, right? Once you have that in place, you can then take on these structures, otherwise you're not going to be powerful enough to do it. Take on those structures and start to dismantle them and start to build something new in its place. Now, how do you build that collective power? Then you're going to run up against, you know, some of these questions that kind of revolve around things like unconscious bias and individual trauma and things like that, that now in the context of a collective struggle, take on a new form.

They don't disappear. They take on a new form. What I mean is, is, you know, capitalism is always kind of it's capitalism is not just something out there for us to fight against right it's also something inside us because we're shaped by the society with it and if we're going to fight something inside us um we need to also you know like the question is is do we need to do some kind of work on ourselves first to make ourselves ready in order to join some kind of struggle or do we transform ourselves through being in the struggle right and my argument is the second of those right we transform ourselves through being in struggle. I think it was Jose Marty who said,

the best way to find yourself is to be in service to others, right? It's that kind of idea. By being in struggle, you know, it's not about being, you know, it's not about focusing on the particular uniqueness of your individual pain, which we all experience in different ways in capitalism. Catholic is constantly breaking our hearts,

constantly making us into monsters, it's constantly forcing us to compete with other people over the crumbs that it gives us, right? that's true for all of us but it's and it's true in different ways for all of us but we don't we're not going to fight that by by turning inwards onto our individual trauma our individual unconscious biases we have to find ways to move beyond that to come together in a collective body so we have that power right um and and it isn't it does involve a process of doing that thing that's very hard for people in this part of the world in the united states to do which is to get out of our individualism right

and get out of our folks on ourselves as individuals and the traumas and pains that we've suffered and the harms that have been done to us and to say, okay, let me put that to one side and think about this bigger picture, this bigger thing of like what we're going to build together, right? But when we do that, we start to feel human in a new way, right? We start to experience love in a new way, joy in a new way, in these movements, perhaps for the first time, right? Because we understand that my growth as an individual starts to depend on the growth of all of us as an individual and that I can't bribe and be fully human unless everyone else is as well, right?

So that's where we need to get to, right? And to me, that's a different way of thinking from what prevails, I think, in many of our movement cultures, which is a sense that the journey is first into ourselves, right? I don't think it is. I think we fix ourselves actually by abandoning that process of navel-gazing and trying to think about other collective, right? And we need to do it in ways at a discipline, right? We need to do, you know, we need to be willing to be committed to spending a little bit of time each week in building this stuff that we're going to build together because that's the only way we do it, right?

You know, going back to Grinandah, Morris Bishop says organization is our greatest weapon. That's what it's talking about, right? It's only if we spend some time in our lives doing that organizing work with each other, building something collective. Are we ever going to have any way of fighting back against this stuff? If we do that, it's the most powerful thing in the world. you know, we forget that some, you know, the value of history, what I'm talking about, like, being inspired by revolutions like in Grenada and so on, is that sometimes it reminds us that

it actually is a very small group of people who would, just by coming together in like a group of 20 or 30, having profound impacts on history. You know, the Grenada Revolution is basically a bunch of 30 people. Yeah, the movement to free Ghana from British colonialism begins with a group of 20 or 30 people coming together. Within two decades, it's free we'd garnered from the British rule. So it doesn't require that we persuade the whole of society to agree with us.

It requires that we have a small number of people willing to work together in this committed way, committed to each other and to that cause. And that's what we need just a lot more in our movements today. Yeah, I think that that's a great note

to wrap us up on, but in way of closing everyone, I'd like to ask you to tell the listeners how they can find more of your work and where they can find the book, but also with that last point being on what we need to be doing within our organizing circles and within our movements, if you could also talk about just briefly while you're closing, what are some things that are giving you hope these days? Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, like, I think, so in the U.S. context,

I think the, you know, the 2020 uprising, while it kind of was. of its moment and it isn't clear what kind of new things it's created subsequently to that. You have a generation of kids there who are out on the streets and that doesn't go away. That doesn't, you know, those people's lives have been changed for good and that will come back in all kinds of new ways over the coming years. So I think there's, you know, there's a radical future for that generation in the United States. in the UK, you know, one of the things that I think probably is not even understood very well in the UK is that right now there have been two different court cases where in each case a group of, a small group of people who opposed the deportation of foreign nationals from the UK, got on flights or got on runways and blocked those flights from taking off. on two separate occasions and the prosecutors tried to put them in prison

and juries acquitted them because they made a political defense of what they were doing in the trial. Now that's huge because that means that basically now you've got a situation where civil disobedience in Britain against attempts of deport can be done with a reasonable chance that you're not going to go to prison for it. And that's a huge opportunity to build a mass movement around that. You've also got, you know, really interesting work that's being done about Palestine. You know, we talked about the question of what kinds of work can people be doing in imperialist countries to act in solidarity with struggles against imperialism and other parts of the world.

Well, a good example is what the group Palestine action is doing in the UK, where they occupy, you know, the offices of companies like Elbit that are involved in supplying the weaponry and technologies for Israel's colonization of power. Palestinians, right? And disrupting that part of Israel's colonial project that has a hub in the UK. You know, you've got you've got people who are doing really amazing work trying to get cops out of schools, which is a, you know, which is a relatively new thing in Britain to start having a lot more police officers in school. It wasn't as a case. A couple of years ago where black teenager was strip searched by a cop and it kind of educated people into realizing what's at stake in this issue. And schools are great places to do all organizing because you have a

group of parents who get together and have a shared interest in the well-being of their kids in that school. And they kind of start to know each other. Organizing in schools with parents is like a huge opportunity. And so things like that, you know, to me, like where you want to focus your energy if you were based in the UK and trying to think about what kind of collective organizing can you do around anti-racism. And then further afield, you know, like I say, like I was talking about before this the landist

workers movement in Brazil you know the huge mobilization of mobilizations of farmers in India a couple years ago

like some of the largest mass movements in the world that you know we've seen in recent years all these different things are not going to fit into a single story

you know but I think they all in different ways of pieces of this jigsaw of how we take on racial capitalism in all kinds of different parts of the world you know

and that's you know that's where I have we're not going to you know we're not going to have the kind of international social revolution in the short term what we're going to see in the short term is is you know groups of people coming together in certainly in the United States and UK it's not going to be like majority it's going to be small groups of people coming together but having a big impact nevertheless right climate change is an obvious area where that's going to happen right in other parts of the world it is going to be mass movements more and more you know, as we get a new round of kind of IMF debt crisis and, you know, cost of living crises for people in the global South that are very different from what they look like in the United States and Europe, where it's about are you going to be, you know, able to survive the hunger, where you're going to see, you know, like flooding and overheating because of climate change, just making places unlivable in really extreme ways, you know, like we're looking at a wave of mass movements around that stuff over the coming years. and we should be ready for that and understand that them, you know,

that a movement in Nigeria that's trying to fight for a shell to get out of the country, for example, you know, like that kind of movement is, you know, very amenable to coordination with both of us in the country like Britain of the United States who are also trying to deal with, you know, like how we stop fossil fuel extraction. You know, like, these are, these are going to be more and more opportunities like this, I think, for these kind of transnational actions. If we just get at our, like, what's stopping us is, is the, is just the intellectual failure to comprehend how, how this is going to look, right? In terms of tracking me down, I have a website that is my last name.org, so that's K-U-N-D-N-A-N-I, and if you go on there, you can find my books and my link to my Twitter and things like that.

Thank you very much for having me. Really enjoyed chatting with you all this morning. Yeah, absolutely. So again, listeners, our guest was Arun Kunani, who is author of what is anti-racism and why it means anti-capitalism, amongst other books. I know I wanted to talk about the Muslims are coming at some point. But yeah, so thank you very much for coming on Arun. Listeners, just as a heads-up, since Arun mentioned, Palestine Action, just so you know,

our spin-off show, Gorilla Radio, hosted an episode with the founders of Palestine Action. We also put that onto our feed, and we'll be talking with the founders of Palestine Action again in the future to get updates on what they are doing. And since we also mentioned the Indian Farmers' protests, we also talked with some journalists in India about the Indian Farmers' protests at the one-year mark after those protests started. So again, feel free to look through our feed. You'll find episodes on each of those topics. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other podcast? Well, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan, A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and the other podcast I do, which I think Arun's episode with

me, a wonderful conversation is still one of the highest, you know, liked and downloaded episodes. So we really appreciate him coming on there to talk about his work on Islamophobia and imperialism and the global war on terrorism. So that's the mudgeless M-A-J-L-I-S. You can find it on all the usual platforms. Yeah, absolutely highly recommend everybody do that. Brett, how can the listeners find you and your two other

excellent podcasts? Yeah, you can find everything I do at revolutionary left radio.com. That's It's all three shows, socials, Patreon, even some merch. So you can find me there. Excellent. Of course, I recommend the listeners do that as well. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter, or whatever it's called, at Huck, 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. The translation of Domenico Lestorto Stalin History and Critique of a Black Legend that was translated

and edited by myself and Salvatore Engel de Morrow is now available. You can get it on Amazon. bookshop.org if you want to support your local bookshops, which I highly recommend you do. I see Brett has his copy came in finally. It's in his hand right now, and we'll be talking about that book on Rev Left very soon. We're recording it a week from today, if I remember correctly, Brett, so listeners stay tuned. We'll have another episode talking about that book. And as for guerrilla history, you can help support the show and allow us to continue doing what we do by going to patreon.com forward

slash guerrilla history. Again, guerrilla is spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter and keep up the date with all of the things that we're doing by going to

at Gorilla-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore pod. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. So, you know, I'm going to do. Thank you.