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LPE Originals

Predatory Inclusion: A Long View of the Race for Profit

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NB: This post is part of a series in our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. The ascending slope of our current housing crisis is a good vantage point from which to think about Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new history of the federal response to an earlier point of crisis: she gives us reason to reconsider the role…
LPE Originals

How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

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This post is part of our Race for Profit symposium. Read all posts here. In Houston’s upscale Galleria-Uptown neighborhood, the mall known simply as “TheGalleria” is, according to its website, “Texas’ largest and most luxurious shopping destination.” A local real estate website confirmed the value of the location, pointing out that housing values in the neighborhood…
LPE Originals

Service Workers or Servile Workers? Migrant Reproductive Labor and Contemporary Global Racial Capitalism

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This post is part of a series on Care Work. Read the rest of the series here.  Grassroots migrant worker activists, particularly those working as domestic workers or care workers, have characterized their labor experiences as “servitude,” “modern-day slavery,” and “bondage.” They use these terms to describe both their workplace conditions and the power dynamics…
LPE Originals

A Single Federal Usury Cap is Too Blunt an Instrument

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In May 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled the Loan Shark Prevention Act, a bill that would cap the cost of consumer credit nationwide. Under the bill, the total cost of a loan, calculated as an annualized percentage rate (APR), could not exceed 15%. If fees and interest are capped at 15% APR, lenders cannot recoup the costs of making and servicing small-dollar, short-term loans. Only charitable or government-subsidized institutions could lend at that low rate.
LPE Originals

Teaching Penal Abolition

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In April, the New York Times ran a profile on abolitionist visionary and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Harvard Law Review published an entire issue on prison abolition. This fall, the University of Texas Law School Human Rights Center is hosting a conference on abolition. The new journalistic outlet The Appeal runs abolitionist pieces…
LPE Originals

Transportation Justice: from Civil Rights to the Right to the City

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In the year 2000, the writer Joan Wypijewski visited Montgomery, Alabama, to observe the 45th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. Her findings were notable: “Montgomery’s transit system isn’t segregated anymore. It barely exists.” As Wypijewski told readers, the 1990s had not been kind to transit. After two decades of local Republican leadership, and following…
LPE Originals

Human Waste Management

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This post explores “extraction” as a keyword for analyzing the social and ecological world. Like “reproduction,” “extraction” has a Marxist pedigree, but it also carries at least four connotations that “reproduction” doesn’t. The first is non-renewability; the second is corruption; the third is waste; and the fourth is violence.
LPE Originals

Institutions of the Solidarity Economy

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Solidarity economy institutions are local democratic institutions that function together to build a democratic political economy. Through solidarity economy institutions, local communities are creating the beginnings of a democratic political economy in which everyone controls together the systems that provide the things we need to live meaningful and joyous lives.
LPE Originals

The Solidarity Economy and Economic Democracy

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Even though humanity possesses the wealth necessary for every person to have everything they require in order to live with material freedom and dignity, current property regimes allow for 26 billionaires to own as much wealth as 3.8 billion people around the world. Many grassroots movements are trying to change this by imagining and building democratic political economy planning capacity through “solidarity economy institutions” premised on transforming the legal and institutional forms through which humans can coordinate to produce, exchange, and distribute, everything that we need in order to live.
LPE Originals

The Globalists: Law, Race, and Empire In and Beyond Intellectual History

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This post is part of our symposium on Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Read the rest of the symposium here.  ‘We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not’, proclaimed Tony Blair in 1999, possibly the high-point of (neo)liberal internationalism. In his masterful Globalists, Quinn Slobodian reconstructs…
LPE Originals

The Impact and Malleability of Money Design

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Only when the monetary project of the agrarian populists failed did Americans settle on the exclusionary system that Baradaran describes. The contrast suggests that designing money is shaping community; it can bring people together or set them at each other’s throats.
LPE Originals

Black Proprietorship and Crises of Value

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The history of black banking, even for its many failures, holds a unique perspective on property and its contradictions of value. It also contains a deep lesson about how economic strategies generate and are reinforced by affective practices—and how racist economic laws rested on public feelings of their own.
LPE Originals

Symposium: The Color of Money & Racial Capitalism

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This history of black banks and the economy of segregation reveals how inextricably financial markets are tied to racial exploitation, and how the dominant economy can continue to extract from racially subordinated groups through “color-blind” market mechanisms.