A Dedication

This symposium of the Columbia Journal of Law and Race, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, is dedicated to Keith Aoki, 1955-2011. Keith died an hour after I arrived at his home in Davis, California. One hour and he was gone

Critical Race Theory and Marxism: Temporal Power

This Essay on modern progress spins out of Marxism a theory of time about which Marxism itself has remained largely unconscious. Marxism is a theory of the already-taken. Critical Race Theory has as its animating spirit, its haunt, a related—but up until now only latent—temporal theory of the already-taken. The unconscious, we learn from psychoanalysis, does not know time; it is timeless. The authority of law comes to us from this same time out of mind. The four corners of this Essay's theory of the already-taken are Marxism, Critical Race Theory, psychoanalysis, and jurisprudence. The already-taken is the unconscious of law

When the Stars Begin to Fall: Introduction to Critical Race Theory and Marxism

Marxism, they say, is dead. But the classless society is nowhere in sight. Racism is also dead, or so they tell us. But the colorline is still wrapped tightly around the world. The reports of these deaths are connected and premature. They are connected to the destruction of words. They are premature in the way declarations of final victory are always premature. If we credit Louis Althusser's observation that "philosophy represents the people's class struggle in theory," then our engagement with these attempted dispossessions is a serious matter. This project will show the vitality of Marxism by locating it within what Critical Race Theory should become

The Apogee of the Commodity

Slavery is death. The body of this death is white-over-black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The body of this death is eternal and therefore with us still. Slavery is white-over-black, segregation is white-over-black, neosegregation is white-over-black, and all of it is death. White-over-black is the death that it is the slave’s calling to produce. The slave produces this death through its juridical prayers for equality of right. The slave perfects its own slavery in this manner. Rights cannot be equal. There are always ambiguities. The ambiguities are always available for a white-over-black reading. The fact of white-over-black, of the general habit of reading things in white-over-black ways, which is what prompts the slave to pray for equality of right in the first place, shows that whatever is granted will be read in the general way, white-over-black. The fact of white-over-black shows the way that we have been trained. We follow our training into our future and so rights are white-over-black, white-over-black only, and that continually. The dream of equal rights, so important to slaves, results only in the continued fact of white-over-black. If the dream is the disguise of the wish then the dream of equal rights is the disguise of the slave’s own desire for white-over-black, for death. The slave’s unacknowledgable death drive is the secret of the commodity and its fetish. Contra Marx, commodities do speak. Commodities speak of equality of right, equality of right only, and that continually