This chapter argues that an analysis of the racial capitalist state cracks open a subterranean archive of anarchism. Drawing on the queer utopianism of José Esteban Muñoz and the other-worldly space-jazz of Sun Ra, I theorise the antipolitical as a utopian worldmaking project which exists beyond bourgeois modernity and its ideas of science, rationality, and linear progress. I contrast this with recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ and ‘globalise’ anarchism, which largely have focused on radical labour and trade union movements in the global periphery. Unlike these traditions, the antipolitical is a promise of liberation whose source exceeds the profane and material, and which finds inspiration in dreams and fantasy, the magical and the divine.

Resisting Racial Capitalism begins with the premise that we need to look beyond the hegemony of the state and its grammars of justice. Drawing on C. L. R. James and Cedric Robinson, it argues that the state is not a neutral arbiter of justice that can or should be appealed to for rights, recognition, or restitution. Rather, the state is a relation of violence which is central to racial capitalism. This is a type of violence which cannot be reformed away through a politics that merely strives to make oppressive institutions more diverse, inclusive, or tolerant. As a permanent war waged on those deemed delinquent, wayward, and undeserving, the state must itself be abolished.

Chapter 3 examines policing as a street-level form of governance which is central to racial capitalism. Focusing on the murder of Marielle Franco and police violence in Rio de Janeiro, it argues that policing functions as an ongoing war on groups and communities deemed wayward, delinquent, and undeserving: what I describe as a ‘war on dirt’. From Rio to London, Ireland to India, policing has been a key mechanism through which the state orders bourgeois society. Policing thus understood is a dirt-producing system which orders as it rejects, sanitizes as it represses. Drawing on afro-feminist quilombismo and recent work on black anarchism, the chapter argues that the struggle for police abolition must be anarchised and extended to target the racial capitalist state as a whole. Viewed antipolitically, abolition requires a break, not just with carcerality, but with state logics and governance in its entirety.

Political theory has traditionally started from the assumption that the public and the private belong to separate spheres, with the implication that the domestic household is beyond the reach of the state. This chapter challenges these assumptions. Drawing on indigenous, black, and decolonial (queer and trans) feminisms, it explores the history of heteropatriarchy as a racial and colonial history of reproductive extraction and control. I argue that racial capitalism operates as a bourgeois sexual order which shores up the white propertied family by extracting reproductive labour from those it deems racially perverse, degenerate, and bereft. Racialised ideas around what counts as family ‘proper’ have thus functioned as a central tool of capital accumulation. By re-visiting The Communist Manifesto’s famous demand – ‘Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family!’ – through a racial capitalist lens, this chapter reconfigures ‘family abolition’ as the antipolitical undoing of state-sponsored white bourgeois domesticity.

Chapter 1 theorises the state as a set of carceral, administrative, legal, and extractive systems which are central to racial capitalism. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, this chapter charts how the state arose as a revanchist response to the popular struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy that swept through Europe in the late medieval period. This revolution from above saw the emergence of whiteness as politics came to be associated with domestication, mastery, and rulership. State-building was thus from the beginning a racial-colonial project, entailing both internal centralisation and domination as well as external conquest and enslavement. Since then, politics as we know it has revolved around governance, domestication, and mastery.

Chapter 5 explores the relationship between plunder, property-making, and state power. Focusing on the struggle against the destruction of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, it argues that capital from its inception has operated by turning land into objects that can be owned, appropriated, and sold for profit: a process that, following Traci Brynne Voyles, I call wastelanding. By examining the role of state violence in extractivist projects, the chapter develops a critique of environmentalist initiatives premised on reforming, seizing, and ‘greening’ the state. Instead, it theorises land-based struggles against mega-dams, mines, plantations, oil fields, pipelines, and other extractive projects as part of a wider antipolitical project of refusal.

This chapter argues that the contemporary policing of migrant lives is part of a longer trajectory in which the state has always sought to control the movement of the displaced and the dispossessed. Today’s global border regime is a (post)colonial infrastructure of state violence which enables an ‘imperial mode of life’ for some through the containment, abandonment, and super-exploitation of others. To take this seriously is ultimately to reject the idea that migrant justice is attainable through humanitarianism, citizenship, and more open borders. Such measures might go some way towards dampening the violence that is unleashed on migrants on a daily basis, but are incapable of uprooting the violent structures that render migrants disposable, precarious, and super-exploitable. In place of state-centric reforms, the chapter theorises borders as a crucial site in the antipolitical struggle against racial capitalism and the state.

The conclusion explores the wider meaning and significance of the antipolitics of refusal. Drawing on recent scholarship by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Bonnie Honig, I move towards an understanding of the antipolitical – not as an escape from, or return to, the polis – but as a project of building autonomy, care, and horizontalism beyond racial capitalism, the state, and their violent terms of order.