“Refusing Proper Subjection” - Andrew Krinks on the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
Release Date: 01/03/2025
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
In this episode we interview Tariq Khan on his book The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. We’ll be releasing this conversation as a two part episode on this excellent book which studies how anticommunism within the US is deeply intertwined with settler colonialism, anti-indigenous thought, and genocidal violence. This helps us to reframe our often twentieth century centric view of anti-left repression in the US. Khan’s work on the 19th century in particular also helps us to see the ways things like race science, eugenics, and...
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In this episode, we speak with Khadijah Haynes about her recent piece, "A Fetus on the Dirt Road” which offers a sharp critique of Western feminism's complicity in imperialism and its historical roots in racial violence. Haynes argues that Western feminism often obscures the struggles of both Black women and men, relying on colonial and anti-Black logics that fail to address the broader context of sexualized, gendered, and racialized abuses of all Black African people. We discuss other historical and contemporary critiques of feminism, argue that feminism does not have a...
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In this episode, recorded mid-2024, we speak with Ted Rutland about the evolution of policing from the mid-20th century's professional model to the counterinsurgency urbanism that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in Canada. Rutland discusses how community policing, initially intended to bring police closer to communities through multicultural training and social services, became a strategy to win over parts of the community while waging a larger war against the rest. We delve into some of the historical shifts in policing largely as a response to radical movements and urban...
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This is the conclusion of our two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Among other things, in this conversation we talk about the impact and meaning of 1492 to the Muslim world. We discuss Kashani’s concept of the Blues Adhan by way of Clyde Woods. We discuss the experiences of women muslims, and women scholars in Kashani’s book. We talk about the two jihads and other Muslim practices such as zakat and the contradictions between Islamic thought and practice and those demanded by the capitalist and carceral state. It’s a rich discussion that I hope folks find as interesting...
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In this episode we interview D. Óg, an Irish Republican and Irish language activist who works with Iskra Books, and their Irish language imprint Bradán Feasa. In this discussion we talk about the Iskra Books publication . Hughes, was a former Irish Republican Army volunteer, political prisoner, and Hunger Striker. And while he is a very well known figure within Irish Republican circles and among those who have studied the provisional IRA, some folks may also have become introduced to him through the book and the Fx/Hulu series Say Nothing. In this episode I talk to D a bit about...
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This is the first part of a two part conversation with Maryam Kashani on her book Medina By The Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival It’s a cool book that weaves Maryam’s scholarly ethnographic work with her talents as a filmmaker and a DJ to examine and illuminate various strains of Islam in the San Francisco Bay Area from the Black Power Movement to the so-called war on terror and the rise of the surveillance state. She dubs her approach an “ethnocinematic.” We discuss legacies of anti-imperialist Islam on Turtle Island as well as more assimilative ways of being. We’ll...
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In this episode recorded mid-2024, Josh spoke with Dylan Saba about some of his essays beginning with one titled "A Struggle to Destroy the World,” where he argued that the condition of Palestine is the condition of the modern world. We discuss the role of the Iron Dome as an offensive system, its historical context, and its implications for the colonial-imperialist power imbalance in the region. Saba also provides an overview of the strategic use of aid as a weapon to maintain control, division, and weaken Palestinian resistance. We also touch on how the Israeli military's...
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This is a light edit of a we hosted with Abdaljawad Omar on our YouTube channel. The conversation was so timely and incisive that we wanted to ensure there was also a version on our audio podcast feed. In this discussion we cover the Tufan of Return, talk about the ceasefire, the prisoner exchanges, the decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure, and the concept of Nakba within Palestine, getting into the issues that Abdaljawad has with the divergent meanings of the word, which get conflated in many analyses of 1948 and into the present. There are on our YT channel, about different topics...
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In this episode, we speak with Darryl Li about some of his essays. We begin by discussing his work and experiences in Palestine. His transformation from an NGO worker in the early 2000s to a scholar and political activist. Li explores the interpolation of Jewishness into a racial category globally. He also explores the Law of Return, which allows any Jew in the world to not only settle in Israel but also to enjoy superior rights to the land than Palestinians. The conversation covers the evolution of Palestinian armed resistance, particularly in Gaza, and the shift in Israeli strategies from...
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This is the conclusion of our two part interview with Andrew Krinks on his recently published book . Today we explore the religious functions police play for Christian societies, in particular the US, and their relationship to theological concepts of redemption and salvation. We also talk about religious discipline, labor discipline and regimes of prison labor, which is obviously topical with renewed discussions of incarcerated fire fighters with the recent . Krinks also explains why the dehumanization of prisons should not be understood as a violation of their mandate, but a fundamental...
info_outlineIn this episode we speak with Andrew Krinks about his recent book White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization.
The book is really interesting and I highly recommend it, this is part 1 of a 2 part discussion we recorded on it. You can pick it up from Massive Bookshop the bookstore that uses their revenue from book sales to bail people out of jail.
In this discussion Krinks goes into the religious function that the mass criminalization of Black, Brown, and dispossessed peoples serves within the racial capitalist system. Engaging with Marxist and materialist explanations as well as Christian theologians and bourgeois philosophers, we get into how police and prisons are tethered deeply with religious ideology, which also finds quarter within the so-called secular theorists who provided the political philosophical underpinnings of the capitalist system. We also get into dynamics of race making and racialist thinking by way of folks like Cedric Robinson and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to examine the connection between race making and property relations.
I’ll also note that last year we hosted a video conversation with Melayna Kay Lamb and Tia Trafford about the philosophical underpinnings of police power that has some important areas of overlap with this discussion as well, but focuses a bit more on European secular philosophy and policing.
Starting on Monday the 6th we’ll be hosting a new live series on our YouTube channel with Mtume Gant who is a filmmaker, media critic, and professor of film, where we will be talking about Cedric Robinson’s Forgeries of Memory and Meaning. So if you like this conversation I think you’ll find a lot of resonance with those discussions as well as they really go into how and when race-making processes are instrumentalized in the media, using historical examples.
And lastly it is a new year, and we have a ton of new content coming this year. Last year we published 115 video episodes, and 38 audio episodes. We hope to be similarly productive again this year, but in order to do that we do need your support to be able to put in the amount of time necessary to get all that work done. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month. We should have another study group starting up in February and that is open to all of our patrons as well. So head over to Patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and kick in a $1 a month or more to that effort.