Still an obsolete prisons? (Are prisons obsolete?) The trial is about mass incarceration of the poor and illegal immigrants. These beings that capitalism considers undesirable offer cheap enslaved labor and, at the same time, become captive consumers of surplus production at the origin of the economic crisis that generates poverty and immigration, forming a perfect loop. Is there a similarity between these incarceration policies and the process that took place in the leap from feudalism to capitalism, which, after being expelled from the so-called reproductive lands, forced millions and millions of people into wage slavery?

There is certainly equality between the two eras, but it is perhaps more important to see that there are also great differences. As Marx explained, the closures of lands and other expropriatory processes in the leap from feudalism to capitalism deprived people of the lands they had previously lived and, at the same time, created a class of people who had nothing but their workforce. In this way, those people became the labor force needed for emerging capitalism to increase its assets and riches. Yes, they had freed themselves from the coercions imposed by feudalism, but they had been forced to replace one form of oppression by another. Although it is generally useless to make a ranking of forms of oppression, and although exploitation is the fundamental pillar of capitalism, we can say, however, that the distancing from slavery and feudalism marked some progress. At least some workers found the way for employment, even though the work was humiliating both then and today.

On the other hand, the global industrial penitentiary complex is very profitable, but what underlies this profitability are technologies based on the marginalization of countless people into non-productive lives full of violence. Blacks, people of color and immigrants, as well as racism and xenophobia, who are massively imprisoned throughout Europe and Australia, remain in the United States. This highlights the failure of global capitalism to respond to the needs of real people around the world. One could say that it is also a tangible proof of the need to represent a socio-economic system beyond capitalism. Thus, the current abolitionist movement, when calling for the closure of the industrial penitentiary complex, is an anti-capitalist movement that poses all the demands of equality between races, wages they give to live, cheap housing, free health, free education and environmental justice for all living beings.

Restorative justice prevails over punitive justice. How do we restore injustice and inequality caused by the process of primitive accumulation at the root of capitalism? In other words, what would a "original sin", a process of exploitation and accumulation of imbalances in our societies, a restorative justice with the aim of restoring?

Yes, on many occasions I have used the term "restorative justice" along with the terms "restorative justice" and "transformative justice" as an alternative to punitive justice. I prefer "transformative justice" in itself, because I do not believe that there is an ideal situation that needs to be restored. In response to your question, I would like to emphasise the importance of historical memory, especially as regards the current need for an explicitly anti-capitalist analysis. The "secret of primitive accumulation" is one of the most important parts of Capital, as it reveals expropriation, injustice and violence that, although it seems otherwise, were characteristics of the beginnings of capitalism, remain at the very core of capitalism. At the end of the twentieth century, the industrial penitentiary complex showed us the basis of capitalist societies in racist and colonial ideologies, in the creation of violent technologies that synthesize by themselves the historical violence of slavery and colonization.

The automated reaction to crime and crime -- going to policemen and judges instead of looking for solutions within the community -- has been problematic and has defended feminist self-defense in response to sexual violence. This brings us to the topic of "women and violence." Still an obsolete prisons? "It is necessary to question the perspective that the only possible relationship between women and violence is that which considers women victims," the book says. What do you say about the disciplinary and disturbing use of self-protection feminist violence? What is feminist self-defense for you? What would be the right Community response to tackle violence against women?

I have always been very careful when using the term violence. As a critical theory researcher, I always remember that the conceptual instruments I choose can act against what I want to express. If so, I try not to consider the "self-defense" and violence of the aggressor as the same. And by betting on training in self-defense, there is an analysis and a strategy that relates misogynistic violence to systems of racial, gender and class domination, a strategy that tries to eradicate all exploitation and violence in our societies.

He abrogated the myth of the black rapist of Women, Race and Class and demonstrated that it was "a political invention": propaganda designed to justify black lynchings, a method of "counterinsurgency" to prevent blacks from accessing their rights. In the New Year's Eve we saw that same myth in Cologne, in the bodies of men of "Arab and North African", in a new example of purplewashing, that is, the use of the supposed defence of women to criminalise asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, with the message that we cannot rape our women more than we do. What do you say about this tendency to use women’s rights (headscarf, black rapists, women’s oppression in Afghanistan…) for other crusades?

Arrested Justice: In the book Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation EE.UU. Beth Richie exposes the risks of turning to criminalization technologies to solve problems related to gender violence. In his view, the main anti-violence movement in the United States was wrong when he opted for police and jail as the primary strategy to protect "women" from male violence. It was easy to foresee that men from communities that are already dependent on police hyper-surveillance and have a disproportionate weight on the growth of the prison population would be the ones most expected in order to keep "women" safe. The more general and widespread use of the category "woman", on the other hand, concealed a secret rationalization within that category, according to which the word "woman" meant in itself "white woman", or more exactly, "rich white woman". The case of the colony and the discourse of the Arab rapists, which aims to further strengthen the colonial perspectives of the Arab man as a sexual aggressor, remind us of the importance of feminist theories and practices that question the racist instrumentalization of "women's rights" and emphasize the intersectionality of the social justice struggles.

In recent decades, we have lived what Nancy Fraser has defined as a "process of decoupling identity policies from class policies", instead of redistribution, recognition has been put at the center, making the leap from a collective subject to an individual subject (ista). You, on the other hand, have opted for "fighting communities", as you say, "communities always to political projects [because]." What do you think of identity policies and what are the struggles and political projects that should be at the center of this era of neoliberal hegemony?

The main problem I find with identity politics is that identities are often naturalized and are not seen as consequences of political struggle and, in this way, are situated in the relationship with the class struggle and the fight against racism. The trans movement, for example, has emerged in recent years as an important field in the struggle for justice. However, there is an important difference between the main representations of trans themes and trans intersectional movements: the former emphasize individual identity; the latter consider race and class as fundamental pillars of trans struggles. Instead of focusing on the individual's right to "be" what they want, trans intersectional movements question structural violence (violence in the hands of the police, the prison system, health professionals, the housing sector, the world of work…), because trans women of color have far more chances of suffering than any other group in society. In other words, they drive the radical transformation of our societies, rather than trying to assimilate them into a given and unchanging situation.

Following the theme of identity, when he talks about intersectionality, it seems to me that he talks about conjugating different struggles (Ferguson, Palestine), rather than uniting different, multiple and diverse identities, at a time when many agents claim intersectionality, instead of questioning identities, they despise the material and historical context that surrounds them, strengthen and naturalize those identities. How do you understand intersectionality and how it's working right now?

The concept of intersectionality, as I understand it, has a very interesting genealogy, and its origin in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As now and here I cannot go into much detail, I would highlight a few points: the creation of the Alliance of Black Women, for example, in response to the effort to discuss gender issues within the Non-Violent Coordinating Committee of Students (the most important youth organization of the Southern Liberation Movement). To maintain this assertion, Fran Beal wrote in 1970 an article that was widely disseminated: "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" Black and being female). Shortly after the publication of this article, after knowing the struggles of Puerto Rican women against forced sterilization, among other things, changed the name of the Black Women's Alliances, became the Alliance of Third World Women and began publishing the Triple Jeopardy magazine, focused on racism, sexism and imperialism. This change was a sign of a militant attempt to confront simultaneously racism, misogyny and imperialist war. In the sense of this organic intellectual effort to understand the categories of race, gender and class as interrelated, combined and cross-linked categories, I understand the current feminist visions of intersectionality.

At the Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB) in Barcelona, the newly created "La fronteracom a centre. Zones of being i of not being [migra i colonialitat]" [Central border. Houria Bouteldja de Partides Indigènes de la République said in the conference entitled Areas of being and not being (migration and colonality): "I don't know what it is to be white, but the French police know how to distinguish it very well. They never mix up when it comes to deciding who to discriminate against and who to bring". Likewise, the Basque feminist Itziar Ziga, in an interview published by ARGIA, defined what it means to be a woman as follows: "I am a woman because I have been raped in this way; physically, sexually, affectively, economically, symbolically ... I scream that I am a woman, but not for what I have between my legs. In both cases, the subject is defined politically as a space of oppression and, therefore, struggle. In this sense, what does being a woman mean to you? And to be black?

The two categories have been extended and extended beyond any border that I would have imagined in other phases of the past of my life and, therefore, although I would like to maintain the historical forms of being, I would nevertheless be obliged to continue to use the political definitions of gender and race, in both cases, as you say in your question, both from the point of view of the structures of domination and the associated ideologies and from the point of view of overcoming collective movements. On the other hand, I have always insisted that radical practice should take precedence over pure and simple identity. It's more important to allow a radical transformation than you imagine of your identity. And of course, as I said before, gender and race categories, like sexuality and class, only make sense within more complex relationships.

With regard to US policy, he stressed the "challenge of making the discourse more complex" and stressed that "the simplification of political rhetoric facilitates the adoption of extreme positions". In recent years we have seen in Europe the rise of movements that are presented as "new policies". They claim that they are against the "top" and that their goal is to achieve a "democratic revolution," through a "smiles revolution." What does democracy mean to you in this era of depoliticising populism and mere indicators?

The people on the left in the United States, and not just on the left, but also in conservative circles, are absolutely impressed, of course, by the increasing influence of Donald Trump. The point is that this simplistic, extreme and fascist political rhetoric attracts the white communities of the working class, which Trump serves precisely. As with the dangerous attraction of far-right characters and parties in Austria, France, Poland and other European countries — the economic downturn and the refugee crisis has, incidentally, shown the enormous impact that the history of slavery and colonialism in Europe still has — far-right populism is reinforced by racism against blacks and immigrants. It will be impossible for us to deal with this extreme right-wing populism and to encourage dialogue on the future democracies — on the transformative visions that shift the focus of political attention from the neoliberal representation of the individual to the needs and aspirations of the communities — if we are not able to build strong movements against racism and xenophobia around the world.

Faced with the question of whether you would support someone in the election of the President of the United States, you recently stressed the need for a new party. Why? What kind of look do you have in your head? What parity and what differences should the new party have with regard to the Communist Party as a candidate for the presidency of the Communist Party of the United States? As far as the programme is concerned, do you think that the Black Panther Party's Ten Point programme remains valid? Who would be the voters of this new party?

The electoral policy of the United States has been a prisoner of the system of both parties over the past few years. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are essentially bound by capitalism. We need a different political structure, which does not bend over to corporate structures and which prioritizes the needs of workers, the poor and people of color. This has been evident in many election cycles, and years ago, when I participated in electoral policy as a candidate for the vice-presidency of the Communist Party, I stressed the need to claim the independence of both parties with regard to this system. In view of the response to Bernie Sanders, it is clear that there are a large number of people who want an alternative to capitalism. More and more workers, anti-racist movements, feminist issues and LGBTW are reflecting seriously on the need for a party that represents the demands of the fight against war and environmental justice. As for the Black Panthers Party, it is clear that the Ten Points programme has its roots in the historic conditions of the mid-twentieth century, but at the same time each of these points is closely related to many of the current radical struggles.

Following the Black Panthers, the party pioneered the policy of "womanism": it placed women's rights at the same level as class struggle and racial struggle, supported abortion, organized nurseries during meeting hours, compared to the bourgeois nuclear family that promoted the traditional model of African extended family, the party newspaper had directors, and women reached 70% of the militancy. How did all this happen, unless the men were killed or in jail? What lessons can the current liberation struggles, especially the feminists of those movements, draw from the experience of the Black Panthers Party?

In fact, we should not be so surprised to learn that the majority of the Black Panther Party militants were women, and the same could be said of the fundamental role that women play in the South Liberation Movement. What's surprising is that, half a century later, we continue to be captive to historically obsolete visions of male charismatic leadership. Throughout history, paradigms related to women's leadership, from Ella Baker to Ericka Hugginsern, have influenced collective leadership more than individualistic leadership. The young people of today's radical movements are driving other leaderships: women, queer, collectivities...

As a student of Marcuse, I would like to ask him a question he put in his An Essay on Liberation: "How can an individual meet his or her needs without reproducing with his or her aspirations and satisfactions, his or her dependence on an apparatus of exploitation that, by satisfying his or her needs, perpetuates his or her slavery? ". In other words, how can we free ourselves from the commodification of our feelings?

Coming here, I do not know if it is possible to completely circumvent the consequences of the mercantilized desire, which is the character of the current desire: capitalism has so far invaded our internal lives, that we can hardly separate them. In any case, it seems to me that when I say that I follow Marcus’s philosophical tradition, we must try to develop a critical conscience to see how we are contributing to the reproduction of capitalism through the commodification of our feelings. Through these negative reflections we can begin to see the possibilities of liberation.

When you were in Bilbao, we had the opportunity to act on the importance of art and literature, to broaden the limits of intelligibility, to reduce the hegemonic paradigms of common sense, to question the coercive straitjacket of credibility, to break the monopoly of reality and to understand each other as the framework for translating, configuring and testing our political notions. What is this all about?

Especially in what seems that the political conflicts that seek to show us the path to better futures have rejected the possibility of liberation, we can resort to what Marcus calls the "aesthetic dimension" and Robin Kelley calls the "dream of freedom" or "radical imagination". What the kingdom of capitalism has drowned has been our collective ability to imagine a way of life different from that of goods. That is why we need art, literature, music and other cultural practices: to educate our imagination, so that it can be freed from the coercion of privatization.

When you were in the Basque Country, at the concert they offered you in Bilbao, you mentioned a beautiful song by Nina Simone:I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, which says: "I wish I could break all the chains holdin' me, I wish I could say all the things that I should say, say 'em loud, say 'em clear for the whole 'round world to hear" (I would like to break all the chains that support me, I would like to say all the things I have to say, say everybody out loud. What is it to be free and what are the chains that have to be broken?

I remembered I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free by Nina Simone, not because I would like to imply that, after half a century or more, I have a round answer to the passion for knowing what it is to be free, but because it still guides us that desire to name and experience freedom. And this goal is much more complex today than in URL0. of the mid-20th century. Because if at first it seemed that the closer we were to what we imagined as a "freedom," the clearer we see that the thing is much more complex, much wider...