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LPE Originals

Labor Governance in the Shadow of Racialized Mass Incarceration

The threat of precarious work does not come exclusively from marketization swamping a shrinking welfare and regulatory state. It comes as well from a metastasizing and thoroughly racialized carceral state, one that simultaneously speaks the language of public violence and sings in the liberal key of choice. Even critical accounts of the criminal legal system fail to fully capture the relevance of this dynamic, focusing only on how it produces economic exclusion, not also incorporation on subordinated terms.

LPE Originals

Reconstructing the Algebra of Race and Rights

I follow Patricia Williams, Angela Harris & Aysha Pamukcu, in arguing universal rights, to basic income and other resources, are insufficient but necessary ingredients for justice. Indeed, I argue for permanent, non-discretionary funding of these rights. No one truly knows how much money the U.S. government spends encoding and encasing private property rights, much less private capital’s rights to coordinate or contract. In many ways, these costs are “baked into” society. So, ultimately, should it be for rights to income, healthcare, housing, education, employment for all.

LPE Originals

Leftist Benefits are In-Kind, Actually

The argument goes that cash benefits, such as UBI, afford recipients the dignity to choose what they need, versus in-kind benefits which paternalistically define that need for them. By removing government restrictions on spending, they allow recipients the freedom to consume on their terms. However, this so-called choice is in name only without a guarantee that basic needs will be met. The context of housing provides one example of this. The reality of cash benefits is that even where choice is not restricted by the state, it remains restricted by the failures of the market.

LPE Originals

Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse

It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work.

LPE Originals

UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic

Surely advocates of such programs do not envision Qatar as their model society. And yet it is too easy to imagine a version of a Gulf state arising from a basic income initiative that provides cash support to citizens, who no longer need to take work that is unsatisfying, while denying it to noncitizens, who are brought in do the difficult and dangerous jobs that remain.

LPE Originals

Politics in, of, and through the Legal Academy: Akbar Interviews Matsuda, Part 2

Mari Matsuda is a central scholar within the critical traditions of legal scholarship: in particular Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and feminist legal theory. Amna Akbar sat down with her virtually, on December 3, 2020, to ask some questions about her insights on where we are today, where we have been, and where we might go. Today’s part of the conversation focuses on how legal analysis has changed and how movements do and should influence legal scholarship.

LPE Originals

Politics in, of, and through the Legal Academy: Akbar Interviews Matsuda, Part 1

Mari Matsuda is a central scholar within the critical traditions of legal scholarship: in particular Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and feminist legal theory. Amna Akbar sat down with her virtually, on December 3, 2020, to ask some questions about her insights on where we are today, where we have been, and where we might go. Today’s part of the conversation focuses on the origins and the legacy of CRT.

LPE Originals

K-Sue Park on How She Teaches Property

This past semester, Emily Prifogle hosted a series of conversations on “Race and Property in Historical Perspective”. As part of that series, she talked with K-Sue Park about her article discussing how she teaches property. This conversation seems likely to be of interest to LPE-ers who teach or study property (and others!).

LPE Originals

Privatized “Affordable Housing” Is A Scam

You hear it everywhere: we need more “affordable housing.” It’s a seemingly uncontroversial call, and yet… a group of members of the LA Tenants Union were compelled to document the many and profound problems with the dominant model of privatized “affordable housing” in the United States.

LPE Originals

Not an “Achievement Gap”, a Racial Capitalist Chasm

Throughout this pandemic, transnational corporations and white parents alike have been sounding the “achievement gap” alarm under the guise of concern for “voiceless” Black and Brown children, but in service of their own neoliberal agendas. The students they speak of, however, can speak for themselves — and as they struggle through this time, with a fierce resilience that no young person should be forced to cultivate, their realities and their words call for more radical solutions.