Elite Capture: How The Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (& Everything Else)
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- čas přidán 7. 06. 2024
- Join Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation about the politics of solidarity in the fight against racial capitalism.
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“I was waiting for this book without realizing I was waiting for this book.”-Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition
“Olúfémi O. Táíwò is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalism’s latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world.”-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture-deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.
Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.
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Speakers:
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He is the author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) and Reconsidering Reparations. His work exploring the intersections of climate justice and colonialism has been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy.
Robin D.G. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and the author of many books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression.
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Dissent Magazine. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important organizing, programming and publishing work.
i am old and often didn't have language for these things. i thank you for formulating great language to cast these issues in an understandable light
Listening for the third time over since the initial release. Still finding much to chew on. Excellent conversation on a topic that, while not new in any sense, find currency today. I thought too about the various kind of "politics" at play: identity, deference, etc. All play into the gathering and performance of power, power sharing, and power investiture.
it starts at about 32 minutes into it. Olufemi begins talking about elite capture about 35 minutes in. Connects a lot of the dots.
thank you B, you rock
I think they have cut the extra stuff now. Please consider removing or editing your comment as it may confuse future viewers. It certainly confused me.
@@uncanalmenor The sir Alufemi, we are at the times where leadership is critical, but yet it has long been purchased by vested interests.
Every time a promising leader rises, they get bought to abandon their virtues and become instruments evil.
Virtue is found at the bottom where most critical humanpotentialis found. But when they offered the money, unfortunately they are found to be wanting.
This is great food for thought. Robin looks a day shy of 45. Oluremi is brilliant. Excited to read his books!
"It's not that they don't have answers to all the issues...it's that they don't have questions--their individual needs are taken care of" --yes, this issue and the delicacy that 'essential worker' designation has called forth. Such an important distinction.
I love this. We all need to figure out what is happening to us, so we can reduce somnambulation around the 🌎 Thank you for sharing this with everyone.
Really great stuff!!! I learned a lot and love both of y'all's perspectives, nuance, and rigor
appreciate this video a lot... sharing it with friends!
Thank you. An outstanding guest.
I recently heard about Elite Capture from the talk by Juan Gonzalez at Democracy Now. I've yet to get the book . The first thought I had encountering the term 'passing the mike (mic.)' was the much- neglected phrase: Yo Yo Empowerment. I heard that years ago
and it since defined much of my opinion on the idea of capture after a brief window of
'agreement' , allowance or 'deference' by the powerful that this author is bringing forward.
A good discussion. Upped and subscribed to Haymarket.
This was so good
This sounds like the objective side of corporate capitalist empire that matches
its subjective side, ideological hegemony.
Normaluzation of Domination Ideologies
Have radical, working-class politics been captured by academics. Academia gives the space to explore ideas, but my impression is it is shaping these ideas also - and this capture seems inevitable given the sorry state of unions and union organizing. But the shaping of these ideas from the ivory tower risks making them disengaged and alienated from the working class.
Yes. They have. Or more, kept on life support my Academia, rather than captured. Exterminated everywhere else. So not really captured. But they're not great at propogating it back to the public either.
A great discussion, an important if significantly flawed book (the system orientation obscures elite accountability), and a larger debate whose contours remain incomplete and often poorly engaged.
Olufemi, at 43:35 you ask a very important question, and it's rooted in the founding of the USA. The colonies refused to pay "taxes" aka production tax on crops grown here, where plantation owners didn't want to pay the tax. They ignited the American revolution with the explicit intent of no longer being a part of the world bank. Then after 100+ years off boom bust, the Biggest Banks in the country conspired to create the federal reserve bank system (aka new world bank). Since then all politics have been controlled by the banks, who control our currency and pay heed only to those banks and their biggest shareholders.
The World Bank did not exist in 1775. The revolution was ignited because of tax grievances, the lack of representation and the British enacting some of the brutal colonial policies they used in Ireland/India. It did not have to do with a world Bank that didn't exist in 1775 and definitely has not controlled our political system since 1911
Okay, it is nice to point this out but that is honestly just Capitalism and every power that tries to break away - will eventually come back to big banks because the whole point of Capitalism is a accumilation and movement of Capital itself.
I love you, bro!
Banger discussion
The host spoke more than the guest
They also connect that phrase "Elite Capture" with the World Economic Forum
13:05 I totally agree with it.
Sometimes it seems to me that some of those activists who portray themselves as protectors of oppressed minorities or promoters of freedom to oppressed minorities push their agenda in such a forceful way that something really important gets lost : personal choice or freedom to choose.
(I wouldn't state that they become oppressive in their own right because that would be over simplistic - ..... well, I just did it).
Peace.
They are ID sectional chauvinists---their
new chauvinisms oppose old chauvinisms---only solution is knee jerk
reverse opposite reaction--- dialectic 2nd
part ("My chauvinism is better than your
chauvinism."
Only class based movements that deal
+.capital + empire & sectional ID
movements can transcend/synthesize
these conflucts.
African revolutionary projects in which state transformation has been interrupted, the causes are often a combination of indigenous compradors and foreign capital.
At that time, W corporate capitalist empire was too strong. alternatives
like USSR, China. etc. were too weak.
Since 1970s, Unipolar coalition was
rising high.
The Combahee River Collective
13:40 why should we have solidarity with any group that normalized the term "it is too much unpaid emotional labor" to raise class consciousness, and moralized the commodification of interpersonal relationships, transforming all of life's decisions into cost-benefit analysis of emotional labor, while simultaneously creating a culture that worships those that are the most efficient at exploiting surplus labor? Underneath our #bekind culture, we worship privilege.
The 6th section misspelled “Combahee” as “Kumbaya”…
There is not enough political force in the world built on should. This is why I am in awe of Brother Maurice Muhammad. You search for the whole of the disaffected. He has a core. I would not be welcome among his flock. If I were, it would be in submission to Allah, and it would be healthier for me.
*Combahee River Collective
Quite literally
I love haym books, but this is truth, my critique of identity politics comes straight out of the fact that (search) "the similarities between market liberalism and standpoint epistemology". Ok then, that means this whole project of power equals privilege was not just coopted, but epistemically grounded within neoliberal frameworks.
To be honest, it was understandable why there could never be any trust in any other framework BUT neoliberalism, the same happened with china.
search my main work