Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò - Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)

Praise for Elite Capture

I was waiting for this book without realizing I was waiting for this book. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition

Olfmi O. Tw is a thinker on fire. He not only calls out empire for shrouding its bloodied hands in the cloth of magical thinking but calls on all of us to do the same. Elite capture, after all, is about turning oppression and its cure into a (neo)liberal commodity exchange where identities become capitalisms latest currency rather than the grounds for revolutionary transformation. The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world. Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Olfmi O. Tws book is worth sitting with and absorbing. While critically examining what happens when elites hijack our critiques and terminologies for their own interests, Elite Capture acutely reminds us that building power globally means we think and build outside of our internal confines. That is when we have the greatest possibility at worldmaking. Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist

Olfmi O. Tw offers an indispensable and urgent set of analyses, interventions, and alternatives to identity politics, centering, and much more. The book offers a sober assessment of the state of our racial politics and a powerful path on how to build the world that we deserve. Derecka Purnell, author of Becoming Abolitionists

With global breadth, clarity, and precision, Olfmi O. Tw dissects the causes and consequences of elite capture and charts an alternative constructive politics for our time. The result is an erudite yet accessible book that draws widely on the rich traditions of black and anti-colonial political thought. Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination

Among the churn of books on wokeness and political correctness, philosopher Olfmi O. Tws Elite Capture clearly stands out. With calm, clarity, erudition, and authority, Tw walks the reader through the morass, deftly explicating the distinction between substantive and worthy critique and weaponized backlash. Understanding the culture wars is essential to US politics right now, and no one has done it better than Tw in this book. Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works

Olfmi O. Tw is one of the great social theorists of our generation. Elite Capture is a brilliant, devastating book. Tw deploys his characteristic blend of philosophical rigor, sociological insight, and political clarity to reset the debate on identity politics. Tw shows how the structure of racial capitalism, not misguided activism, is todays prime threat to egalitarian, antiracist politics. And Tws suggested path forward, a constructive and materialist politics at the radical edge of the possible, is exactly what we need to escape these desperate times. Anyone concerned with dismantling inequalities and building a better world needs to read this book. Daniel Aldana Cohen, coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

Tws book is an insightful and fascinating look at how it is that elites capture and subvert efforts to better society. Anyone who wants to understand and improve upon the activist movements shaking our world needs to read this book. Liam Kofi Bright, assistant professor at the London School of Economics

This book, building on one of the most lucid, powerful, and important essays I can recall reading in recent years, is, in a word, brilliant. Read itand read it twice. Every sentence contains multitudes. Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig

2022 Olfmi O. Tw

Published in 2022 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-64259-714-1

Distributed to the trade in the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution (www.cbsd.com) and internationally through Ingram Publisher Services International
(www.ingramcontent.com).

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and institutions. Please email for more information.

Cover design by Steve Leard.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Contents

Acknowledgments

As always, I have an uncountable number of people to thank for this work.

Thanks to my family for their support: my siblings Ibukun and Ebun, and my parents Abiola and Yetunde, all the Taiwos and Sokunbis, and all the Cincinnati Nigerians; Abigail Higgins, the Higginses, and the Kennedys.

Id like to thank my editor, Emma Young, and Haymarkets, Sam Smith, as well as all those who helped make the logistics of this book possible: Anthony Arnove, Stephanie Steiker, Suzanne Lipinska and those at KIOSK and Africasia who made her journalistic work available to me, including Simon Delobel and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. This book grew out of two essays published at Boston Review and The Philosopher. I want to thank Deb Chasman, Matt Lord, and their colleagues at Boston, as well as Chiara Ricciardone and Anthony Morgan and their colleagues at The Philosopher for their support on the initial versions of this idea, which made this book possible.

A special thanks to supportive scholars whose direct and indirect support made it possible for me to be here at all: AJ Julius, Daniela Dover, Melvin Rogers, Jason Stanley, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and folks whose work, teaching, or leadership I leaned on implicitly or explicitly: Josh Armstrong, Quill Kukla, Mark Lance, Bryce Huebner, Henry Richardson. To friends and comrades whose support and advice was were just as essential to making it through the writing: Liam Kofi Bright, Marques Vestal, Thabisile Griffin, Austin Branion, Alexis Cooke, Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Joel Michael Boxcutter Joelie Reynolds, Jeanne-Marie Jackson-Awotwi.

To the institutions and organizations I have able to learn in and from: The Undercommons, UAW 2865, UCLA Labor Center, LA Black Workers Center, and Pan-African Community Action.

To our moral ancestors, without whose struggle and sacrifice none of this would be possible: to the anti-colonial fighters, to the abolitionists, to the workers who demanded more, and to the activists who refused to accept less.

To all of our moral and genealogical descendants, to those who are yet young and those who are yet to come: with love, with hope, and with solidarity.