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“Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Forms”
What happens when we understand liberalism writ large not as a philosophy of freedom or just order, but as a theory and praxis of command that operationalizes racial capitalist worldmaking? We start from the premise that capitalism doesn’t work without making masses of people and the planet suffer violence and that an enduring function of liberalism – especially as manifested in the form of the nation-state - is to organize and represent the violence capitalism requires as socially good violence: as national self-defense, as energy security, as the maintenance of law and order. Liberal epistemes accomplish this by continually sorting between people and places fit for command and those who need to be commanded; between those fit for the “political,” the realm of agency, and those consigned to the “administrative,” whose passivity and obedience are demanded “for their own good” or in the name of “the common good.” The intention of this operational account is to show that racial capitalist operability is always threatened by protocols for making, continuing, and defending specific, grounded living (Black, Indigenous, migrant and more). By refusing killability and authorizing mutual survival, such “other doings” evade and break state-capital violence circuits. Though pushed below or outside of ‘politics’, as defined by liberalism, such doings together are powerful, transformative forces.
