Afropessimism Contra Marxism?

Primitive Accumulation, Immigration,

and Social Death
Kieran Aarons
This presentation was delivered at the Crisis Party working group in Berlin, in February of
2013
INTRODUCTION
What follows is an attempt to reflect on issues that surfaced while organizing at the
intersection of the anti-capitalist fringe of Occupy Chicago and local immigrant and
undocumented communities in the Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen in South Chicago. Parts
of it have been adapted from a talk given at the invitation of Occupy El Barrio (a dominantlyHispanic neighborhood Occupation) and Casa Atlan, a Hispanic community initiative against
social violence.
I do not wish to give the impression of speaking for immigrant struggles in Chicago.
The organizing experience I am referring to came from the side of anti-capitalist work and
was attempting to build bridges toward the struggles of undocumented persons in Chicago,
while warding-off the liberal tendencies within our own milieu which perpetually threatened
these alliances. In brief, the perception by many in south Chicago at least by November and
December of 2011 was that the composition of the main Occupy was a bunch of middle class
White liberals. This was of course largely true, and especially at the outset. Nonetheless, an
anti-capitalist bloc did exist within Occupy which attempted to work against the tide of coploving law-championing Statist liberalism that foreclosed alliances with underprivileged and
criminalized communities on Chicagos Southside, and this paper attempts to reflect on these
attempts.
With this as its historical frame, the paper will begin by focusing on the ideas that I
found were most well-received by the undocumented community. I will then try to anticipate
some potential challenges to them, in particular stemming from Afropessimist theory.
So although the paper emerges from a struggle, its not exactly a report-back, and so
will not engage in a concrete evaluation of all of what took place over the course of the past
year. And although partly theoretical, its goal is not to intervene in theory or Marxist
philosophy per se, but to try and draw a few ideas into close proximity with a specific
problem in the US.

Before I begin, since I accept the dictum that ones thought is inseparable from
(though perhaps not reducible to) ones social positionality, and especially since this paper
speaks to issues of race and undocumented peoples, I should note that I speak as a legally
naturalized, White-skinned, cis-bodied male with access to higher education and legal
employment. I belong to what Frank Wilderson describes as the social formation of
contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets.1 This should at all times be kept in mind.
PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION AS POLITICAL FRAME
In what sense can the structural logic of the expropriations that signed the birth
certificate of the modern working class serve as a lens through which to link anti-capitalist
struggles and those of migrants and non-status workers globally?
The lens sought here would imply a dialectic according to which those who have been
illegalized, those from whom the protection of the legal/economic order have been
withdrawn, can develop a common perspective upon the bourgeois legal order, which is the
perspective simultaneously of the dispossessed and the illegalized. The original idea was that
by attempting to situate itself within a deliberately trans/post-national subject position of the
Worker (whether employed or not), such an approach to building solidarity aims to
undercut nationalist as well as natalist tendencies that instrumentalize the law in order to
marginalize or discredit the demands of non-citizens and undocumented persons. This was
the hope, in any event.
In Capital Vol. 1, Marx shows that the emergence of the class relations that constitute
capitalist social formations are historically predicated on a bloody process of legal and
extralegal robbery in 16th and 17th century England and France, a movement including three
overlapping processes:
Dispossession

Criminalization

Internment

Peasants and subsistence farmers are expelled from their land en masse, which was
then enclosed and privatized under large estates, or converted to pastureland, resulting in a
progressive disintegration of pre-capitalist forms of life. Their means of subsistence having
been stripped, the newly dispossessed flood into cities.

In response, laws are put in place criminalizing vagabondage, homelessness, and

unemployment in urban centers, with penalties ranging from exile, to bodily mutilation and
even death. Laws such as these served as instruments of capture for the newly constructed
Hpitals or internment houses, the precursors of the modern factory, while brutal statutes
against larceny and petty theft served to prevent any alternatives to wage labor. As the
Marxist criminologist David Greenburg writes, The Elizabethan underworld of thieves,
gamblers, and confidence men had its origins in the same processes that made capitalism
itself possible: the massive forcible restructuring of economic relationships.2 Criminal law
in this period was an instrument for the restructuration of economic relationships, providing a
violent receptacle for the migrant flows coerced from the countryside to the city. Expulsion
and criminalization serve, therefore, as the preconditions for the acquisition of the labor force
of pre-capitalist life, giving birth to the modern working class who, lacking any other means
of subsistence, must sell their labor for a wage in order to survive. On the other hand, the
plunder of the expropriated farms, secularized monasteries and enclosed commons
concentrated a flow of money in the hands of wealthy landowners.
Importantly, for the US context, Marx includes chattel slavery and native genocide in
this process:
The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in the mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and
looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of
black-skins []. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive
accumulation. (Marx 1974: 751).

(I will return to this point in a moment). In addition to presiding over the origins of
capitalism, in the Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg notes the on-going parallel
character of this process:
Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical
process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to
the present day.3

While Luxemburg presented this dynamic as one in which Capitalism adventures outside of
itself as a closed system in order to forcibly open up trade with non-capitalist social
formations, as David Harvey points out, what is essential is not the continued pre-existence
of non-capitalist societies on the outside, but rather the ability, by various means of coercive
force (violence, simple robbery, legal coercion, structural adjustment, war, etc.) to produce a

source of profitable investment by fiat, and thereby to perpetuate the cycle of expanded
reproduction:
Put in the language of contemporary postmodern political theory, we might say that
capitalism necessarily and always creates its own 'other'. [C]apitalism can either make use
of some pre-existing outside or it can actively manufacture it.4

What I would like to focus on is how this Marxist narrative about the origin of
capitalism places in relief the process of illegalization as a technology of domination and
internment, a subtraction of the protection of the law enabling an opportunistic recapture of
an economic force.
From the point of view of solidarity, the analogical link that we sought between the
critique of capitalism and the struggle of the undocumented had this political-economic
violence of the law as its orienting question. For the combination of these two legal and
extralegal mechanisms of domination (expulsion/illegalization + acquisition) describes a
fundamental dynamic that is clearly operative in the situation of illegal/undocumented
workers.
When Congress passed NAFTA in 1994, 6 million people stripped of their means of
reproduction migrated to the United States. The US Department of Homeland Security
reports that between 2000 and 2010, the undocumented population grew by 27 percent, of
which 39 percent entered in 2000 or later, and of which 62 percent were from Mexico. The
result is that, as of 2010, nearly 11 million people live in the United States without legal
immigration status.5
The ultimate effect of the legal exclusion of these people is not at the end of the day
to prevent new people from arriving, but to withhold rights from those already here. The goal
is to produce, on the territory, situations in which the law no longer applies: they create legal
suspensions of the law.6 The supposed goal of enforcing the spatial borderlines of the
territory, in reality has the effect of creating on the territory a legal borderline between those
who can be protected by the law and those who cannot.
Yet, just as with the birth of the working class in the 16th and 17th centuries, this
illegalization also includes people too, at another level. Undocumented peoples are excluded
from legal protection, yet included in the market as hyper-exploitable labor. Illegalization
therefore amounts to a means of deregulating the wage relation.7 Employers use this
vulnerability as a pretense to deny overtime pay, slash wages, and fire workers when they
protest or organize. Carefully-calculated INS raids, round-ups and deportations create a

climate of fear and insecurity which serves a disciplinary purpose of discouraging

organization and rebellion.
This structural analogy between the legalistic depredations that installed capitalist
domination and those continuing today was the fundamental aspect that informed the
conceptual frame we employed in the organizing last winter and spring, culminating in large
demonstrations, public transit fare strikes and marches on April 7, 2012. The focus remained
on the use of the law as a tool of displacement and acquisition, and the goal was to found a
kind of coalition between Occupy groups and immigrant populations (documented and
undocumented) that would be premised on an antagonistic alliance toward the bourgeois
legal order.
I would like now to try and think through this analogy a bit further, which I think still
risks of a serious blindness as to its positionality, which can perhaps be worked through if
other dimensions of the logic of primitive accumulation are emphasized.
THE POSITIONALITY OF SOCIAL DEATH
In addition to this process of legalistic dispossession and hyper-exploitative wagederegulation, the logic of primitive accumulation also highlights distinct modalities of
domination which have been differentially accorded throughout US history. For this reason it
is significant that Marx intends the category to embrace slave hunting, internment, and
aspects of incarceration, all of which imply direct force relations and gratuitous violence
[DE: eine beliebig Gewalt, FR: une violence gratuite] that go beyond any simple profit
motive. In this respect, the logic of primitive accumulation can be said to bring into relief the
constitutive relation between structural exploitation and the non-reproductive violence that in
fact continues -- along an unbroken historical line -- to characterize Black suffering in the US
under contemporary police impunity and mass incarceration. It is this potential positional
alliance between the Marxist historical frame and the Black subject in the US that is the main
thing I would now like to turn to. In what follows Id like to begin a very preliminary
attempt to incorporate recent perspectives by radical Black authors in the US into this
question of anti-capitalist and undocumented solidarity.
Afropessimist thinkers such as Frank Wilderson, Steve Martinot, Hortense Spillers,
Saidiya Hartman and Jared Sexton (among others) have recently called attention to the
insufficiency of the prevalent anti-capitalist frameworks of struggle to account for the
phenomena of Black oppression, arguing that the modality as well as the very register of

oppression experienced by the Black subject are qualitatively incommensurable with the
classical Marxist problematic of exploitation and alienation. Far from disappearing with
the 13th amendment, or even in the post-Civil Rights period, the basic traits of antebellum
Black slavery have been reproduced and kept alive through the perpetuation of a form of
social death that continues to materially and symbolically locate the Black body outside
Humanity.
At a symbolic level, these theorists argue that Black folk are constitutively denied
symbolic membership within White civil society (both culturally and politically), in such a
way that no analogical bridge to White culture exists through which Blacks could
conceivably wage a war of position or sue for the sort of junior partner status accorded to
White women, non-Black people of color, or immigrants.
At a corporeal level, the social death of the Black body signifies a constitutive rather
than contingent experience of ballistic material violence, situating the Black body from the
outset within relations of direct force that lack the logical coherence characterizing the
exploitation of wage laborers by capital, for example. In short, these authors argue that the
modality of oppression through which anti-Blackness functions, marked as it is by gratuitous
violence, fungibility [DE: Fungibilitt, FR: fongibilit (?) / replaceability] and social death
or ontological incapacity (Wilderson, 2010), is qualitatively and historically
incommensurable with the mode of oppression suffered by non-Blacks in North America
today.
As a consequence of this difference, both the aims as well as the means of Black
liberation differ from those that frame anti-capitalist, feminist, or post-Colonial struggles.
To return to the question at hand, i.e. that of solidarity, Afropessimist authors have
insisted on the need for social movements to consider the difference between those groups
accorded a sufficient quanta of social capital to become junior partners of White civil
society, and Black subjects, who remain shut out of this economy of symbolic recognition.
Wilderson writes (I quote at length):
"Blackness is a positionality of absolute dereliction (Fanon), abandonment, in the
face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through
hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil society's many junior
partners: Black citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this,
coalitions and social movements, even radical social movements like the Prison
Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony, so as to fortify and

extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate only the satiable
demands and finite antagonisms of civil society's junior partners (i.e., immigrants,
white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and
endless antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short,
whereas such coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright
handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are
underwritten by a supplemental anti-Blackness."8
Wilderson calls on us to distinguish between those for whom a 'war of position' is
plausible...who can fight for rights, increased visibility, recognition and so on, since they
possess the requisite 'humanity' or symbolic cach to do so, and Blacks, for whom such a
symbolic analogy with Whites has been historically barred in the US since its founding.
However insufficient, non-Black-people-of-color and immigrants are nonetheless accorded a
symbolic place in a historical/anthropological narrative axis structured by collective volition
and premeditated desire. In spite of their systematic violation, Native Americans were still
regarded as sufficiently sovereign nations to be accorded treaties (their case is more subtle,
but still applies).9 Wilderson's point is that there is no 'inclusion' or participation or
hegemonic struggle conceivable -- and there never has been -- for the Black slave of the
antebellum South, or today's Black prison-slave.
Afropessimist authors often speak of a double register10, by which they mean to
highlight the difference between a contingent, ideological exploitation by variable capital
(a regime of hegemony) and the unwaged, despotic direct force relations that characterized
chattel slavery as well as present-day prison-industrial complex and police terror (a regime of
terror). The two regimes are not merely co-emergent, but, they argue, one conditions the
other: the ignorability and impunity of the direct relations of force upon Black bodies
provide the necessary backdrop for the symbolic rationality of White democracy and the
symbolic currency of social capital within it. The incoherence of Black death, the absence
from the cycles of exchange of police murder of Blacks is the condition for the coherence of
White common sense and hegemonic discourse. As Martinot and Sexton note, this double
register marks the entire discourse of ethics which by taking place within the White
discourses framed by ignorability of police and carceral terror are totally irrelevant to the
Black subject.11 Wilderson writes that, the production and accumulation of junior partner
social capital [is] dependent upon on an anti-Black rhetorical structure and a decomposed
Black body (Wilderson 2003, 20).
In short, the trouble is that, at least in the US context, some groups were never meant

to be assimilated. Whether on the plantation or in the prison, Black bodies were to be either
accumulated or warehoused, and then to die, either in what Joy James describes as the hell
of lockdown, deprivation tanks, control units, and holes,"12 or out in the open streets of urban
ghettos.
One would be right to sense the non-dialectical character of this claim. The
Manichean character of Fanons description of colonial space is reworked with only minor
differences in the differentially-zoned inner city ghettos, marked by a routine gratuitous
violence whose relation to the White space that bounds it is nondialectical in the specific
Fanonian sense of "not in the service of a higher unity", and where "no conciliation is
possible (Ibid, 19). Wilderson follows Fanon in claiming that Blacks are certainly sentient
beings, but that structurally speaking, they are not strictly "Human" since they have been
roundly denied the requisite symbolic capital.
To return to our initial issue, the question radicals need to ask is how can we position
our attitude toward the law not from the point of view of the junior partner of civil society,
but from the point of view of the prison slave, from the point of view of social death? And,
assuming this is possible, what shift would this entail in the rhetoric and practical form of
struggle? The question is complex, and time is short, so I will only gather a few tentative
indications from the aforementioned authors.
First, to approach struggle against the bourgeois legal order from the point of view of
social death would mean going beyond the subject position of the symbolically exploited
worker, which never in fact constituted an accurate description of the generative body of
the US economy. Wilderson writes, the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of
the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital's overaccumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify
the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society, the categories of work and
exploitation. Which is why the inclusion of the positionality of the slave makes a demand
that is in excess of the demand made by the positionality of the worker (Wilderson 2003,
22). To struggle around the identity of the worker means to struggle toward expropriations
of property or a reorganization of production, but these aims, he argues, cannot satisfy the
Black subject, the prison slave. As Wilderson explains,
The worker demands that productivity be fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony,
Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat, in a word, socialism). In contrast, the slave demands
that production stop, without recourse to its ultimate democratization (Ibid).

As opposed to a war of position, Wilderson argues that the subject position of social death
must be comprehended as one of civil war.
Second, and following from this, we must seriously consider whether coalition
politics that trade symbolic currency or social capital backed by an appeal to being workers,
not criminals, are not basically trading in wages of anti-Blackness. All too often, the appeal
to an identity of the worker (look how much our work contributes to society!) either
implicitly or explicitly involves distancing oneself from Black criminality, and is therefore
potentially racist at the end of the day.
This danger, that of reinforcing anti-Black ideology, is not a simple matter of passive
reinforcement, but concerns ideological positioning that has become basic to many if not
most liberal groups working in defense of the rights of undocumented peoples. Between 2006
and 2008, during the height of the California immigration rallies that flooded the streets of
Los Angeles, banners, signs and chants took up the slogan we are workers, not criminals.
The same slogan was found currency in 2011 in demonstrations against Arizonas racial
profiling bill SB-1070.13
In an article published last year entitled the Wages of non-Blackness14, Tamara
Nopper adapts W.E.B. Du Boiss expression wages of whiteness to describe how
immigrant rights struggles often mobilize moralistic claims regarding immigrants character,
productivity, and economic contribution, which draw upon both managerial and capitalist
perspectives of labor as well as anti-Black rhetoric regarding African Americans as lacking a
work ethic, militant, xenophobic, and costly to society. Such a strategy seeks recognition for
immigrant labor, but by amplifying the symbolic cach of immigrant work and
willingness to work through anti-Black rhetoric and practice, functions as a wage of nonBlackness, and is reminiscent of what Du Bois posited as an ideology uniting the planter
and the poor white.
As an excellent article in the journal LIES: A Journal of Material Feminism entitled
Against Innocence recently pointed out, Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate
who is killable and rapable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest
violence committed against one of our comrades. [] When we rely on appeals to innocence,
we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves
with the State.15
CONCLUSION

The rejection of anti-criminal and anti-Black approaches to the question of

immigration and anticapitalism requires we envision ways of expanding the antagonism to
include its real condition within its formulation of the problem. It cannot be simply or only a
matter of a counter-hegemonic struggle internal to civil society, since the latter excludes from
the outset a population of prison slaves (present or in-waiting) who form its condition of
possibility.
In light of all of this, the problem I want to discuss with you is how what I would call
an historically conscious illegalist attitude16 toward anti-capitalist and undocumented
solidarity can be developed, one which would take account of this double register of White
supremacy inscribed in civil society, thereby widening the antagonism by orienting its
perspective around the prison slave.
What would it mean to think the communist position toward civil society from out
this point of view? Wilderson suggests rather elliptically that it involves a shift from a
politics of assimilation to what he describes as a peculiar sort of negative dialectic, which
must be a politics of refusal, a civil war. However, what this means concretely is still rather
unclear, at least to me.
If Wilderson is right that the hegemonic 'analogous' and symbolic exchange-value that
constitutes the relations between senior and junior partners is simply not accorded to Black
bodies, then the counter-structural struggle cannot expect to make advances through symbolic
means. Perhaps this is why he argues that Black liberation and, we might add, that of the
undocumented persons who think from out of this social positionality can only be a
program of complete disorder."17 Lyrical as this formulation is, it leaves unanswered
difficult questions regarding how to negotiate solidarities between subaltern groups and those
for whom the expansion of symbolic hegemony constitutes an obstacle rather than a gain.
From a theoretical point of view, one of the questions I have regarding the continued
utility of the category of primitive accumulation lies in the extent to which this nondialectical relation between the Black subject and civil society may, at another level,
nonetheless be understood as responding to a crisis which Marxists do regard as dialectical.
In his 2003 work The New Imperialism, David Harvey describes as dialectical the relation
between crises of overaccumulation arising within the cycles of the expanded reproduction of
Capital and the new rounds of primitive accumulation (or what he terms accumulation by
dispossession) that work to resolve them. In brief, Harvey claims that crisis arises when the
reproduction of the existing market dimensions hits a wall, so to speak, such that the
accumulated titles to wealth threaten to remain stagnant due to a lack of sources of profitable

10

investment, a stagnancy that can lead to their devaluation. Similar crises of

overaccumulation, he argues, have since the 1970s been resolved by a redeployment of
techniques of dispossession hearkening back to the founding of capitalism, of asset
acquisition pursued through naked force, legal or extralegal expropriation, resource wars, and
so on. Hence it would be tempting to regard the despotic relations of direct violence meted
out against Black bodies as one more weapon within this arsenal of extra-market asset
acquisition. However, Wilderson seems to bar this route of explanation. In an article
published the same year as Harveys study, Wilderson appears to agrees with Harvey that
overaccumulation crises are indeed the question at hand, yet he insists that in its
unwillingness to recognize the qualitative incommensurability of the domination of Slave
with that of the worker, Marxist categories remain incapable of adequately grasping the
conditions through which these crisis are resolved.
The absence of black subjectivity from the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the
discourses inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the
black body of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the generative subject that resolves
late-capitals over-accumulation crisis, the black (incarcerated) body of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, do not reify the basic categories which structure Marxist conflict: the
categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all,
hegemony.18

In a sense then, Afropessimism constitutes a sort of immanent critique of Marxist crisis

theory, arguing that to understand the very conditions under which capitalist crisis is resolved
require recourse to notions of social death, gratuitous violence, and fungibility, phenomena
that produce significantly different perspectives on revolutionary change.

1

Wilderson, Frank, The Prison-Slave as Hegemonys (silent) Scandal, Social Justice, Vol. 30, No.
2, (2003), pp. 18-27.
2
Greenburg, Crime and Capitalism Readings in Marxist Criminology, Mayfield Press, 1981, p.39.
3
Luxemburg, Rosa, The Accumulation of Capital, Ch. 26, (London: Routledge, 2003), p.351.
4
Harvey, David, The New Imperialism, (London: Oxford, 2003), 141ff.
5
Official US Government statistics are available here: Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant
Population Residing in the United States: January 2010, Accessible at
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2010.pdf
6
See Grgoire Chamayou, Manhunts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), Chapter 12, The
Hunt for Illegals. Originally published as Les chasses lhomme, (Paris: ditions La Fabrique,
2010).
7
Chamayou, ibid.
8
Wilderson, Frank, The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal, Social Justice, Vol. 30, No. 2
(92), 2003, p.18
9
On the two dimensions of Savage positionality in the US genocide and sovereignty see
Wilderson, Red, White, and Black Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonism, (Duke, 2011), Part
III.

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10

Martinot, Steve & Sexton, Jared, The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy, Social Identities:
Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 9:2.
11
Ibid, 172: It is a twin structure, a regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror and the
seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a double economy of terror, structured by a ritual
of incessant performance. And into the gap between them, common sense, which cannot account for
the double register or twin structure of this ritual, disappears into incomprehensibility. The language
of common sense, through which we bespeak our social world in the most common way, leaves us
speechless before the enormity of the usual, of the business of civil procedures.
12
James, Joy, Resisting State Violence, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p.34. Cited in
Wilderson, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?, Social Identities, Volume
9, Number 2, 2003, p.238.
13
To take but one example: "Workers, Not Criminals Street Protest Downtown Los Angeles
(video). Accessed November 7, 2012 at: vimeo.com/25431249. See also David Bacon, We Are
Workers, Not Criminals, http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/776.
14
Nopper, Tamara, The Wages of Non-Blackness: Contemporary Immigrant Rights and Discourses
of Character, Productivity, and Value, InTensions, Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011).
15
Wang, Jackie, Against Innocence, Lies, A Journal of Material Feminism, Vol. 1. 165, 168.
Accessible at http://www.liesjournal.info/.
16
Illegalism also names a strain of anarchist thought dating back to the post-Paris Commune period
of struggle, emerging in full-force in the early decades of the 20th century in Paris, and associated
most famously with the milieu surrounding the journal lanarchie and the Bonnot Gang. For a brief
history of its emergence, see Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang The Story of the French Illegalists,
(Rebel Press, 1987). Currently accessible here: http://libcom.org/files/Richard%20Parry%20%20The%20Bonnot%20Gang.pdf
My use of the qualifier historically conscious is intended to indicate that the attempt to account for
racial marginality was not particularly marked in early versions of illegalism.
17
Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. Constance Farrington, (Grove, 1963), p.36. Cited
in Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, p.75.
18
Wilderson, Frank, Gramscis Black Marx Whither the Slave in Civil Society, Social Identities,
Vol. 9, No 2, 2003, p.233.

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