Black radicalism, mutual comradeship & Black Scare/Red Scare w/ Charisse Burden-Stelly

In Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights, Burden-Stelly [https://www.charisseburdenstelly.com/] asserts that modern U.S. racial capitalism is a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation.” For Dr. CBS, “The racial specifically refers to Blackness, defined as African descendants’ relationship to the capitalist mode of production—their structural location—and the condition, status, and material realities emanating therefrom. It is out of this structural location that the irresolvable contradiction of value minus worth arises. Dr. CBS further unpacks Blackness and its relational value to capital by arguing that it is a “capacious category of surplus value extraction essential to, on the one hand, an array of political-economic functions, including accumulation, disaccumulation … While on the other, “Blackness is the quintessential condition of disposability, expendability, and devalorization (Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights, 10). It is here that it can be argued further that this contradiction allows the mutability of oppression of Blackness to be transmitted across time and space, impacting multiple levels of the lived experiences of African/a peoples as individuals moves across perceived social boundaries, while at the same being ascribed to the “disposability, expendability, and devalorization” of the/a collective Blackness. Dr. CBS goes on to write that “modern U.S. racial capitalism is rooted in the imbrication of anti-Blackness and antiradicalism. Anti-Blackness is reduced to a category of abjection and subjection through narrations of absolute biological or cultural difference …” (Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights: 11-12). Today, we explore the praxis of Black radicalism, mutual comradeship, Organize, Fight, Win: Three Decades of Black Communist Women’s Political Writings & Black Scare/Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is currently an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Research & Political Education Team. Dr. Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and historical sociology. Dr. Burden-Stelly pursues a research program that encompasses two complementary lines of inquiry, with the first line interrogating the transnational entanglements of U.S. racial capitalism, anticommunism, and antiblack structural racism. While the second, examines twentieth-century [20th] Black anticapitalist thought with a particular focus on W.E.B. Du Bois and scholar activists in his intellectual community. Dr. Burden-Stelly is co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History and is finishing, Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States. Dr. CBS is co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Three Decades of Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State (University of Mississippi, 2022). Dr. Buden-Stelly’s work appears in: Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, to name a few. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti, and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program! SAULT: Power and Higher Vels Trio - 40 Point Feat. Shabaka Hutchings and Yellow Ochre Pt.1