Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora intervenes in the recent debates about racial capitalism. Unlike most contributions to date, Beyond Racial Capitalism seeks to move beyond a critique of racial capitalism and towards positive visions of equitable, anti-racist, and democratic economic systems. In search of a more solidaristic economic system, the essays in this edited volume turn to what Caroline Shenaz Hossein has termed the “Black social economy”—cooperative economic organizations by and in the African diaspora (Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse, Community-Based Alternative Markets, 2018). The collected essays argue that cooperative economic and social organizations emerged in the African Diaspora to counter the exploitation, expropriation, and exclusion that Black people face in “white-dominated spaces” (p. 15). The contributors explain how cooperative organizations not only function as spaces of community and refuge in a hostile world but also provide alternatives to the logic of profit maximization and individualism that dominate capitalist social orders.

The collection of essays is divided into two parts: “Black Americas: Varied Forms of Cooperativism in Canada and the United States,” and “Reflections on Cooperation in the African Diaspora.” They include essays on the use of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) amongst Nigerian immigrants in North America and Europe; Black cooperatives in the U.S. and Canada, such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and Co-operation Jackson in Mississippi; ganja cooperatives in the Eastern Caribbean; and Quilombolas (land cooperatives) in Brazil, amongst others. The wide-ranging nature of the contributions effectively showcases the rich and diverse tradition of cooperatives in African diasporic communities. It helps address what Caroline Shenaz Hossein describes as a “Eurocentric” blind spot in the literature on “cooperative economics and co-op history” that “ignores Black people’s contributions of economic cooperation” (Black Social Economy in the Americas, 2018). Despite the evident differences in the social, political, and economic contexts, the contributions demonstrate important continuities between the different cooperative ventures in the African diaspora. In addition to emphasizing the role that Black cooperatives play in combatting pervasive anti-Black racism, many of the contributions trace the historical roots of the cooperatives under consideration to struggles against slave labor and the plantation system and histories of marronage. Silvane Silva, for example, traces Quilombolas (Afro-Brazilian land cooperatives) to the early 16th century when “African refugees escaped from the bondage of slavery, settled in […] isolated areas and valiantly fought to resist recapture” (p. 156). Similarly, Kevin Edmonds, in his study of ganja cooperatives in the Caribbean, argues that this style of cooperative farming modeled itself on the example and tradition of maroon communities that sought to escape the “totalitarian nature of the plantation” during the colonial era (p. 139). In this sense, the collection of essays showcases what it means to follow Cedric Robinson’s entreaty to write the struggle against slavery and the plantation system back into the history of capitalism (Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 1983).

Given this historical lineage, it is unsurprising that many of the contributions to this edited volume emphasize the importance of self-sufficiency, informality, and the evasion of hostile state authority as core principles of cooperatives in the African diaspora. The focus on self-sufficiency and fugitivity, however, also raises some tricky questions about the relationship between economic cooperatives and political projects that aim at broader social and political transformations. Are the cooperative organizations under consideration primarily places of refuge in a hostile world? Or can they serve as a model for broader transformative projects that seek to establish a more equitable and inclusive economy? What is the relationship between local cooperative initiatives, such as ROSCAs or land cooperatives, and broader national and international political and economic structures? And what are the vectors of change that would allow us to move from local initiatives to a broader transformation of existing economic and political structures? Several of the essays clearly highlight the vulnerabilities and dependencies of Black cooperatives on global capital flows and national and international institutions. For example, in “Fighting to Preserve Black Life and Land Rights,” Silvane Silva argues that vulnerabilities to hostile state action and the pressure of mining capital have led Black land cooperatives in Brazil to engage more directly with the state to gain basic social rights and “radicalize democracy” (pp. 163, 167). Similarly, in “Routes out of Racial Capitalism: Black Cooperatives in the United States,” Adotey Bing-Pappoe and Amina Mama note that the “absence of any legal framework to support or protect cooperative organizations” makes life exceedingly difficult for the organizers of Co-operation Jackson, forcing them to “contort existing business forms” to gain legal recognition (Bing-Pappoe & Mama, p. 111). Beyond Racial Capitalism therefore reveals a persistent tension between aspirations to self-sufficiency, autonomy, and the evasion of state authority, on the one hand, and the pressures to engage with and transform state structures, on the other. I would have been interested in a more explicit discussion of this tension to better understand how the editors and the contributing authors think about the possibilities and the means of change that will allow cooperatives to move from the margins to the center.

I would also have liked to see a more explicit discussion of the ideological and political divergences between the cooperative ventures under consideration, especially in terms of the differences in their visions for a more equitable, solidaristic economic order. In their introduction “Taking Note of Informality in an Era of Racial Capitalism,” Hossein, Edmonds, and Wright Austin focus on the commonalities between cooperative efforts in the African diaspora, including their communal and anti-racist orientation. While these commonalities come across clearly, this theoretical framing gives insufficient attention to some of the key differences in the visions of a more just and inclusive economic system that cooperatives in the African diaspora—implicitly or explicitly—articulate. One obvious difference between cooperative organizations in the different case studies, for example, is their orientation to the basic principles of capitalist economies. Some of the cooperatives under consideration are explicitly anti-capitalist: Co-operation Jackson, for example, understands itself as an anti-capitalist black nationalist project (Bing-Pappoe & Mama, pp. 114–116). But as Bing-Pappoe and Mama note, “not all of the cooperatives under consideration” are “necessarily anti-capitalist” (p. 110). The mutualist forms of finance that are examined in Chapters 2, 8, and 9, for example, seem primarily focused on achieving equality and inclusion within a capitalist social order by pooling resources, bypassing racist discrimination, and establishing networks that secure access to jobs and economic resources. While the forms they advance diverge from those in commercial banking, they are not explicitly tied to an anti-capitalist project. I would posit that if cooperatives are to provide a model for understanding “what going beyond racial capitalism actually means” (Hossein, Edmonds, Wright Austin, p. 1), one must take seriously the evident differences in their political visions of a more just economic future. Relatedly, I am not convinced by framing economic cooperation in the African diaspora as “second nature” “instinctive,” or “ancestral, cultural, and hereditary” (pp. 6–7). While I do not want to dismiss the importance of cultural traditions of cooperation, this framing seems to underplay the political creativity and agency of those who create cooperative institutions as well as the differences between the forms of economic and social cooperation they create.

Overall, Beyond Racial Capitalism provides rich case studies that detail the diverse cooperative traditions of the African diaspora and inspire fascinating questions about the possibilities for drawing on this tradition in order to envisage a solidaristic, anti-racist, and democratic economy.