Race, Rights and Rebellion in the Custodial State: A Post-Los Angeles Marxian Reconstruction

Abstract

America’s new race/class contradictions erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, providing an impetus to think through the dialectic of political and human emancipation the young Marx articulated in Zur Judenfrage. For Stanford Lyman, the theoretical response to the assimilation of diasporic Jews into modernizing 19th-century Europe was appropriated by American sociologists responding to 20th-century America’s ‘ethnoracial mix’. At the text’s four discursive sites, history contextualizes theory and theory contextualizes history, beginning with a recollection of the authoritarian custodial state and Third World America that came screaming to life with the LA rebellion. At the second site, Black Studies, post-LA, found itself on the discursive frontline of this neoliberal turn. The third site is the intersection of religion, race and rights, where we reconstruct Marx’s theses on the Jewish Question, revealing the undisclosed biopolitics of a racial formation theory embedded in his writings of the 1850s and 1860s on the US Civil War and Capital. The fourth site of this post-LA reconstruction is a discussion of the state and the limits of black political empowerment.