There Are No Utopias

In one sentence: This episode isn't content to say capitalism has a racism problem — historian Robin D.G. Kelley wants to make a harder claim: racism isn't an accident capitalism happens to produce, it's the mechanism that keeps capitalism alive; he tells the story through his own path from Harlem to Seattle to Pasadena, radicalized by violence into becoming, of all things, a communist, and lands on a conclusion that's almost anticlimactic — there are no utopias, only struggle.

How We Got Here

The episode runs in three parts, titled "Racial Capitalism," "The Ether," and "There Are No Utopias" — theory first, then the man, then the payoff.

Part I: Racial Capitalism. The cold open is a montage of Black History Month ads — AT&T, Dick's Sporting Goods, Google, Peloton, all glossy footage of Black Americans striving, laughing, being inspired. Host Ramtin Arablouei points out the obvious: several of those same companies have been accused of unfair labor practices by their own Black employees. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley's read is blunt — if that's not capitalism, he doesn't know what is. Kelley teaches history at UCLA and has spent his career writing Black labor organizers and anti-capitalists back into the record: Depression-era communists in Alabama, bus-driving union organizers during World War II, Black miners who rebelled against their bosses. His theoretical foundation comes from his mentor, Cedric Robinson — after the George Floyd protests in 2020, UNC Press reissued Robinson's 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, which coined the term "racial capitalism": race isn't incidental to capitalism, it's the ground capitalism grew out of, since the world already had racial hierarchies in place before capitalism arrived to exploit them. In Kelley's telling, the theory has three layers — capitalism extracts surplus by pricing racialized labor differently; whole groups (the enslaved, dispossessed Indigenous people, migrant laborers denied citizenship) get classified as less than fully human; and, in what Kelley considers the crucial third layer, racial capitalism's real target isn't Black people at all — it's the capture of the white working class, binding their identity to whiteness and masculinity and, through that, to the ruling class. He quotes a line Cedric Robinson liked to cite from his own colleague, Otis Madison: racism wasn't built for Black people — guns and tanks are sufficient for that — it was built to convince white people they belong on the side of the people exploiting them. The episode cuts this theory against archival tape of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, saying his organization wasn't racist because it understood racism as an excuse capitalism uses to justify itself (Hampton was killed by Chicago police in 1969). Kelley twists the knife: run the numbers, and only a sliver of the "dividend" from racial hierarchy ever reaches white workers — the bulk of it goes straight to capital.

Part II: The Ether. The camera turns to Kelley's own upbringing. In the 1960s, he and his older sister and younger brother lived with their single mother in a tenement on the border of Harlem and Washington Heights, in the years the Black Panthers were at their height, protesters in the street singing that the revolution had come and it was time to pick up the guns. Kelley says he was too young to really be part of any conversation, but the whole thing was, in his words, "in the ether." What actually shaped his worldview was home — he describes his mother as a hippie, barefoot, long hair, wrapped in a poncho, reading the Bhagavad Gita in Harlem; there were no borders in that household, South Africa and Haiti and India and recordings of Mao's speeches all moving through the same living room. In fourth grade, he and his sister were forced to move to Seattle to live with their father, bused every day to a suburban school he calls flatly hostile and racist — not just unfriendly white kids, he insists, but kids who did genuinely cruel things and treated him as less than human. Straight A's earned him, perversely, a homeroom teacher who waged open war on him, throwing his report card down with visible contempt every time. His verdict, years later: forced busing was a failure on its own terms — the overcrowded school he'd left behind in Harlem taught him more than the supposedly "better" suburban one ever did. High school brought another move, back to his mother in Southern California, to Pasadena High, where his one claim to fame in 1980 was throwing the party of the year, DJ and all, The Whispers on repeat. College started at Long Beach State, first as a would-be photography major, then, for two improbable weeks, as a business administration major — a fact he still finds absurd, given that he was, in his words, the anti-capitalist, even though at the time he had no idea what that word meant. Two things happened his freshman year that rewired his life. First: not long after joining a Black fraternity, he and some friends went out for chicken one night and six white men jumped out of a car with two-by-fours, bolt cutters, and pipes and beat him for no reason but the color of his skin, putting him in the hospital. Second, a few weeks later: police threw him to the ground as a suspected criminal, dumped his books in the mud, and pinned his neck and arm — the same arm still in a cast from the hairline fracture the beating had left him with. Both events converged with what he was reading in his new Black studies classes — Frederick Douglass, Chancellor Williams. He majored in history and minored in Black studies for a simple reason: he wanted to know where state violence and racism came from, and what people in the past had done to overturn it. Outside class, he served as vice chair of the Black Student Union and joined a study group run by the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, reading Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James — discovering that his heroes had all been historians was the moment he knew history was his path, though not because he wanted to become a historian. What he wanted, at the time, was to be a communist for life. To be a genuinely good communist, he says, you have to become a historian first — not the other way around.

Part III: There Are No Utopias. The episode returns to 2020, when workers at Amazon's new warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, began organizing to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union — the largest unionization effort in Amazon's history. The first vote failed, more than two to one against; but shortly after, the National Labor Relations Board opened an investigation and found that Amazon had installed a mail-in ballot box in a parking lot under company surveillance cameras, ruled that Amazon had interfered with the election, and ordered a second vote, set to conclude in March, not long after this episode aired. The show's point: treating Bessemer as an isolated story only works if you don't flip back a few pages in the history book. Nearly a century earlier, Alabama saw an almost identical wave of radical labor organizing, led by Black communist farmers during the Great Depression — the subject of Kelley's foundational book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Walk through Birmingham in 1929 and you'd never guess the Communist Party would ever set foot there, let alone build a movement — but that year, organizers arrived at exactly the moment when Black workers were still waiting for Reconstruction's broken promises to be redeemed, and local people responded almost instantly: we've been waiting for you. The communists also brought a sense of connection to a wider world — illiterate farmers gathered under trees to hear young girls read newspaper reports about revolutions in Kenya, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and realized they were part of something global; some of them wrote letters addressed to Stalin himself, asking for troops, genuinely believing that if plantation owners moved to crush them, Soviet soldiers would land at Mobile and truck north to the rescue, seven armed men to a truck. At the same time, FDR's New Deal convinced workers, for the first time, that the federal government was actually on their side; union elections started winning, and the whole working class, not just the communists, was building power. And the harder that power built, the harsher the payback: the Cold War. A clip of Reagan narrating the 1962 anti-communist documentary The Truth About Communism plays in the episode; the FBI began targeting anyone with even a loose connection to communism, and Alabama's Black communists were branded disloyal and crushed. The story jumps to the early 1970s, the largest strike wave since 1946, Alabama in the thick of it again, workers winning hard-fought battles — and this time what they got for it was neoliberalism: a state-backed logic holding that capital creates jobs, that the rich are the ones who will save everyone, so tax policy should let the wealthy keep as much as possible while workers get paid as little as possible, and that's supposedly what keeps the economy running — a logic that, per Kelley, now dominates the world we live in. He's emphatic that the Cold War, not some decline in working people's fighting spirit, is what actually crushed labor insurgency. The episode then cuts back to June 2020: Amazon publicly announces support for Black Lives Matter and pledges ten million dollars to organizations working toward racial justice, BLM itself included. Kelley doesn't pull punches: buying off insurgent movements is an old corporate strategy, and what should really worry you isn't the strategy — it's that people actually take the money. Once you've cashed the check and appeared in the commercial, you owe something back, which makes this tactic more effective than sending in the police, because it strikes at the root question of what you're even fighting for.

Host Rund Abdelfatah pushes back with an uncomfortable question: since the 20th century, infant mortality has dropped and violence has broadly declined — doesn't that suggest these gains happened because of capitalism? Kelley concedes the tension but refuses to give capitalism the credit: it's a dynamic system with built-in periodic and structural crises, and those crises are usually forced into being by the struggles of workers, the poor, and other nations — the National Welfare Rights Organization's demands in the 1960s, for instance, forced the state to spend more, which in turn created a fiscal crisis for the state. Infant mortality really did fall, diseases really were eradicated, but mostly through state-funded public health — capitalism isn't the cause, it's in spite of capitalism. Cheap, stylish clothes from H&M, he points out, run on sweatshop labor across Central America, Haiti, Vietnam, China — proven by the fact that unions are still fighting to raise those wages. Finally Arablouei asks the sharpest question of the episode: could blueprint-style utopian visions — anti-racist, anti-capitalist — be dangerous in themselves, capable of curdling into near-religious fervor? Kelley steps back first: the formal definition of utopia is, literally, nowhere. He's unsparing about his own tradition's record — the Soviet Union was never socialism, it was "redistributive state capitalism"; China raised living standards enormously, but it's a "state capitalist neoliberal society." There has never, anywhere, been an actual communist country. And that's precisely why states that promised utopia ended up suppressing dissent — Stalin's five-year plans existed to prove "we're the best, don't look elsewhere, don't complain." So the revolutionary tradition Kelley belongs to has a one-line creed: there are no utopias. You have to keep remaking your vision, over and over, and remind yourself that what you're doing is only struggle — no promise of liberation, only the promise of struggle itself. That's not nihilism — he puts love back at the center of it, the agape Dr. King spoke of, the ongoing work of building community, because the deeper the community, the harder it is to break apart, even if that means staying in community with people you don't necessarily like, making mistakes together, moving forward together. He won't call himself an optimist or a pessimist, and he won't even use the word hope: the word he uses is struggle, because no one figures out what needs to be done sitting alone in a think tank or writing a blog post — the answer only comes out of struggling alongside other people.

The Core Argument — and Its Twist

The episode's real claim isn't that capitalism happens to have a racism problem — it's a reversal of cause and effect: racism isn't a byproduct capitalism generates in passing, it's the core mechanism that keeps capitalism alive. That's the entire content of the phrase "racial capitalism," and it carries three layers of inversion.

The first: racism is aimed at the wrong target, intuitively speaking. We assume racism exists to terrorize and subjugate Black people — to maintain hierarchy, enable exploitation. But Kelley, via Otis Madison, makes a sharper claim: subjugating Black people doesn't require ideology, guns and tanks suffice for that. What racism actually has to accomplish is convincing white workers — who should, by class interest, be standing in the same trench as Black workers — that the people across that line aren't worth solidarity, that they deserve to work for less. On the surface, racial hierarchy does hand white workers something — no segregation, access to the "whites only" waiting room. But once Kelley runs the math, only a sliver of that dividend ever lands in white workers' pockets; the overwhelming majority goes to capital. Racism raises capital's profit margin, not white workers' actual income. It isn't a tool for crushing the weak — it's a tool for recruiting potential allies away from their own interests.

The second: corporate "social justice" gestures aren't a glitch, they're a strategy. Amazon crushing the union drive in Bessemer while donating ten million dollars to Black Lives Matter reads, intuitively, as blatant hypocrisy. But Kelley argues this is precisely the most effective way capital neutralizes a movement — far more effective than sending in the police. Once you've taken money from the party you're fighting, you can no longer claim, with a straight face, that you're actually fighting it. Co-optation doesn't need violence. It just needs a check.

The third, and the heaviest one in the whole episode: utopia itself turns out to be a fantasy that needs dismantling. Kelley spent his life wanting to be a communist, and yet the conclusion he arrives at is that no country has ever actually achieved communism — the Soviet Union and China are both just different flavors of state capitalism; utopia, by its literal definition, is nowhere. This isn't surrender — it's a more honest posture. He throws out "optimistic," "pessimistic," and even "hope," and keeps exactly one word: struggle. Every time workers built power and won a few fights historically, what they got back was never an endpoint — it was a harder counterattack (the Cold War, neoliberalism). So the real question was never whether we can reach a perfect world. It's whether we're willing to keep struggling, alongside other people, again and again, with no finish line in sight.

Key Voices

• Robin D.G. Kelley — professor of history at UCLA, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression among other books, who has spent decades writing Black labor organizers and anti-capitalists into the historical record. Core claim: racism is the secret mechanism of capitalism's survival, not a byproduct; genuine anti-capitalism has no endpoint, only ongoing struggle.
• Cedric Robinson — historian and theorist, Kelley's mentor, the originator of "racial capitalism," author of the 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, reissued by UNC Press in 2020 after the George Floyd protests and newly relevant since. Not interviewed directly in this episode; his theory is relayed and extended through Kelley.
• Fred Hampton — historical figure, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, heard here through archival tape; killed by Chicago police in 1969. Core claim: racism is the excuse capitalism uses to justify itself.
• Ramtin Arablouei / Rund Abdelfatah — the show's hosts. Abdelfatah pushes the counterargument — that progress might be happening because of capitalism — forcing Kelley to answer it directly; Arablouei keeps pulling the theory back down to present-day specifics like Amazon and Bessemer.

Quotable Lines

• Robin D.G. Kelley: "If that's not capitalism, I don't know what is. This is racial capitalism textbook 101."
• Robin D.G. Kelley: "The story of race in the making of the global capitalist order is also about the capacity of capital in the state to capture the white working class and tie its identity to race as to whiteness and masculinity. So the secret to capitalism's survival is racism."
• Robin D.G. Kelley, relaying Otis Madison: "racism wasn't created for Black people. For Black people, guns and tanks are sufficient. It was created for white people to convince them ... that somehow you need to be on the side of the people who exploit you."
• Fred Hampton: "We're not a racist organization because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism. And we know that racism is just - is a byproduct of capitalism."
• Robin D.G. Kelley: "Justice does not entail taking someone's labor from them, taking someone's money from them, taking someone's livelihood from them, taking someone's home from them so that you can get some money in your pocket."
• Robin D.G. Kelley, on the suburban school he was bused to: "They did mean things to kids, Black kids, and treated us like we were not even human."
• Robin D.G. Kelley, on the Cold War and neoliberalism: "They get neoliberalism. They get a logic, backed by the state, that says that capital makes jobs. Rich people are the ones who are going to save us."
• Robin D.G. Kelley: "Utopia - the definition of utopia is nowhere, OK? That's the formal definition."
• Robin D.G. Kelley: "Now, the revolutionary tradition out of which I come, or that I embrace, is one that says there are no utopias."
• Robin D.G. Kelley: "I avoid optimistic and I avoid pessimistic. I don't even use hope; I always use struggle."

Rich Details & Trivia

• The cold open splices together a string of Black History Month corporate ads — AT&T, Dick's Sporting Goods, Google, Peloton — with the host pointedly noting that these same companies have faced labor discrimination accusations from their own Black employees, using the gap between advertising and reality to set the episode's tone.
• Kelley describes his mother as "barefoot, long hair, wrapped in a poncho, reading the Bhagavad Gita in Harlem" — his entire childhood worldview treated "America" as anything but a sealed-off place.
• After transferring to a Seattle-area suburban school, Kelley's straight A's earned him open hostility from a homeroom teacher; his later verdict was that his overcrowded Harlem school had actually taught him more than the supposedly "better" suburban one — a lived case study in forced busing's failure.
• In college he briefly wanted to study photography, then spent two weeks as a business administration major — a fact he still finds ridiculous: "I'm the anti-capitalist, right? But I didn't even know what that meant."
• Two events in his freshman year changed everything: first, hospitalized after six white men attacked him with two-by-fours, bolt cutters, and pipes; a few weeks later, thrown to the ground by police and pinned by the same arm still in a cast from that earlier beating.
• Some Black farmers in 1930s Alabama actually wrote letters addressed to Stalin asking for troops, genuinely believing Soviet soldiers would land at Mobile and truck north to rescue them if plantation owners moved to crush their organizing — the core material of Kelley's book Hammer and Hoe.
• During the 2021 Bessemer warehouse union vote, Amazon installed a mail-in ballot box in a parking lot under company surveillance cameras; the National Labor Relations Board later found Amazon had in fact interfered with the election and ordered a rerun, still unresolved when this episode aired.

Cross-Domain Connections

There's a solid conceptual link to 神要你发财：繁荣福音与美国资本主义, produced in this same batch: both episodes name neoliberalism as the product of the same historical turn. Kelley says Alabama labor, after winning its 1970s strike wave, "got neoliberalism" — a state-backed logic where capital creates jobs and the rich are the saviors. In How American Life Is Impacted By The Prosperity Gospel, Chris Lehmann's "sanctifying the market" and the mechanism where responsibility always falls back on the individual describe the same history from a different angle — one through labor, one through religion. If 我们都是弗里德曼主义者, also slated for this batch, materializes, the three episodes will likely be able to cite each other directly; that link is flagged here for now. Crossing into the acquired domain, wiki/acquired/episodes/acquired-amazon.md exists, but its content is focused on the scale and efficiency of Amazon's fulfillment network, not the Bessemer union fight or labor conditions this episode covers — same company, different facet, not a substantive overlap yet. No connection to the science domain.

Pages to Build

• 种族资本主义（Racial Capitalism） — the theoretical framework at the center of this episode, coined by Cedric Robinson and extended by Kelley; likely to recur across future humanities entries on American labor and racial history, worth its own concept page.
• robin-d-g-kelley — UCLA historian and the episode's central voice, author of Hammer and Hoe among other works; likely to resurface in humanities entries on labor and Black history, worth an entity page.
• cedric-robinson — originator of "racial capitalism," Kelley's mentor, author of Black Marxism; worth an independent entity page.

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