Conversational Notes on a Conversation between Jandir Jr. and viníciux da silva¹

16 de fevereiro de 2024  | Stefano Harney e Fred Moten

What does it mean to have and to express solidarity as a worker in the art world?  A detour that turns out to be a leap is required to (un)ask this question. We love the 'language poetry' of autotranslation, where Jandir Jr. and viníciux in conversation come across by not quite coming till they’re gone, so that the bridge between blinglish and pretoguês is also detour and detournement, all on the side of the road for surreptitious study. We have another friend named Asher Gamedze. Like Jandir and viníciux, Asher lays down tracks. He studies the Yu Chi Chan Club, a study group/guerilla band that emerged in South Africa in the early sixties. When we overhear Jandir and viníciux talking with Asher as he overhears Neville Alexander and Kenneth Abrahams, the Pan-African bridge flowers out into a matrix in which face to face communication turns into back to back communicability. Cleo Silvers of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, is in that matrix. She appears to reflect on the problem of organizing across race on the assembly line when she says:

“Here I’m standing next to you on the line.” “Well I don’t like you!” “Why you don’t like me? We have to care about each other!” And you have to watch each other’s backs.

As we look closer at her words something disturbs the call for solidarity. There seems to be something else going on, something that is marked by this shift in address. In this quotation from the interview, the address shifts from one that seems to be aimed at a white worker, to a more general address of ‘we’ and ‘you’ where ‘all are involved’ as the Guyanese poet Martin Carter would say.  

In the shift of address, Silver appears to leap over any answer to her question ‘why you don’t you like me?’ In so doing she is also leaping over what might be called the liberal moment in Marxism. This is the moment of individual recognition. In this liberal moment the white worker is to respond to the question of ‘why you don’t like me?’ by recognizing that the black worker is also a worker, and therefore also a person like him. Solidarity becomes the basis for a common humanity, forged in struggle.

But ‘Why you don’t like me?’ isn’t a question about an affective or emotional state or disposition. ‘Why you don’t like me?’ isn’t ‘Why don’t you like me?’ What if ‘you don’t like me’ is a predicate indicating something like an ontological condition whose (very capacity for) status is now in question. Like: Why are you the kind of motherfucker that don’t like me? And what kind of motherfucker is that supposed to be? Why do you have this fucked-up ontological condition that makes you act like you have an ontological condition? You act like you is (you), motherfucker. What if Silver’s inversion of 'don’t' and 'you' is bound up with various preternatural language refusals and criticisms of standard imperial grammars’ dependence upon and buttressing of ontological condition? What if workers struggle must take this up, as a matter of translation, whether in Detroit or Durban or Rio de Janeiro? What if this kind of wordplay’d, translinguistic workplay, where we mess with the metaphysical foundations of settled and settling, standard and imperial tongues, is another way of accepting the imperative to watch each other’s backs? What if watching each other’s backs is where 'you' (and 'I') disappear? Then it will have been quite literally the opposite of liberalism’s I/thou facial recognition regime, back and before each and other in that dusty, historically angelic way that black folk here and there be doing.

So, why does Silvers leap over this moment, the step of recognition of her humanity? The leap is evident in the way she answers her own question, ‘why don’t you like me?’ with the exclamatory: ‘we have to care about each other!’ So why this leap from a question of ‘liking’ to the imperative of having ‘to watch each other’s backs’? Maybe the clue is in the shift to the imperative accompanying the shift of address. Maybe she must move in this way.

Slivers remarkable life in the struggle is marked by great love and commitment, and so it would seem unlikely that she is withholding this moment of common humanity from the white worker out of any kind of bad faith. Equally she would be in no doubt of her dignity and worth. So why is she compelled to leap over this question?

What if, consistent with the black radical tradition of which she is a part, Cleo Silvers is here proceeding not (just) from an understanding of workers’ solidarity in face of capitalism? What if she is proceeding from an understanding of racial capitalism? Indeed, what if she is proceeding — correctly — from the essential analysis of racial capitalism: that capitalism operates through brutality as accumulation not through brutality for accumulation? And again, in the analysis of racial capitalism, this brutality might best be summarized as the imposed relay of individuation and de-individuation.

Put simply, and in a way Marxists ought to understand, racial capitalism understands this brutality as the primary force among the forces of production, not merely a structuring dynamic of the social relations of production. It should be clear that this is not merely a re-reading of Marxism to say such mundane things as primitive accumulation never ended or that there can be no end to racism without an end to capitalism. Those are mere adjustments to the same framework, as the recent misreadings of Cedric Robinson’s or Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work amply demonstrate. In these race + capitalism readings, racial capitalism is understood as capitalism’s historic ability to take advantage and foster divisions of race to exploit and to rule. It cannot be eliminated without an anti-capitalist struggle. But it can be isolated as a social relation of production, even if determinate. It is in this framework, therefore, ultimately a sociological category, separable from capitalist accumulation even if highly functional to it.

But (the struggle against) racial capitalism won’t be framed. There are no terms of (dis)order. So, there is a reason the League organized separately as a black organization despite being stated Marxist-Leninists. There is no path under racial capitalism to integration, and therefore to solidarity in the way Marxists continue to conceive of it, without individuation, without each black worker accepting his individual humanity as the price of integration. When brutality is directly productive not just in its deployment against people and the earth but in enabling people and the earth to produce wealth, integration is the imposition of the individuation. It is segregation and separation’s extension and tool, wielded on behalf of racial capitalism.

Thus, we could speculate that Silver has no choice but to leap to this invocation of care and mutual self-defense, as opposed to, for instance, a call for unity or the new man.  Indeed, another word she might have used for this care is violence. When we watch each other’s backs, we are forcing those backs out of their individual bodies.  Love hurts, so let’s reformulate the question. What does it mean to have and to express solidarity in an art world structured by racial capitalism? It means countering the brutality of the imposition of artist and artwork, which bear the metaphysical foundations of solidarity as the continual suppression of undercommon social and aesthetic practice, before they have been conferred and withheld.

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[¹] Leia a conversa completa entre Jandir Jr. e viníciux da silva aqui.

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 Fred Moten e Stefano Harney são autores de The undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (Minor Compositions, 2013). São também autores de All Incomplete (2021, Minor Compositions, 2021), traduzido e publicado no Brasil em 2023 pela GLAC edições como Tudo Incompleto. E atualmente preparam o próximo livro, Four Turns da Felicity Street. Eles são estudantes da tradição negra radical e membros do Coletivo de Escuta Le Mardi Gras. Fred leciona na Universidade de Nova Iorque e Stefano leciona na Academia de Mídia e Artes de Colônia e mora parte do ano no Brasil [biografia extraída do site da GLAC edições].