Left Limits and Black Possibilities

The chapter reads Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, which traces the black radical tradition to Indigenous African discourses. It uses Robinson to critique the separation between Indigenous Elimination and black Death as the separate, respective spheres of settler and franchise colonialism. It explains that this separation reinforces the break between exploitation (accumulative work) and dispossession (unproductive land). It argues that this break undergirds the labour-work divide, which produces anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity as structurally necessary for capital accumulation and to each other. It explains Elimination as a form of perpetual death that moves across both settler and extractive colonialisms, preventing the reinstallation of bodily or land-based sovereignties. It argues that the radical tradition comprises two strands: one affirming black radical critique of capital and the ontological break between the black and the human on which accumulation is based, and another opening toward indigeneity and parallel forms of labour.