Darius Cret

The April 2025 integration of Ipsotek’s AI-driven video analytics software into Raptor Alert’s emergency management platform marks a significant escalation in the deployment of facial recognition technologies across U.S. public schools. Synthesizing Huey P. Newton’s (1972) theory of bureaucratic capitalism and the interpretive paradigm of Black Male Studies (Curry, 2017), this paper provides a clarifying framework for understanding the counterinsurgent logics at play within AI-augmented school surveillance regimes and their historically entrenched consequences for Black male students. Situating Raptor Alert’s implementation within Victor Rios’s (2011) account of the youth control complex, the paper introduces the analytic device of the potential gang member (PGM) to theorize the institutional mutation of the military-aged male (MAM) category identified by Clay-Gilmore (2025) within educational settings. Factoring in empirical evidence attesting to the presence of racial bias in facial recognition algorithms, alongside the historically sustained and disproportionately punitive disciplinary measures enacted upon Black male students in U.S. schools, we argue that the emergence of an educational milieu in which technologization algorithmically formalizes the androcentric patterns of target acquisition deeply entrenched in American society, collapsing the boundaries between the carceral and the educational, demands that we abandon the reformist metaphor of the “school-to-prison pipeline” in favor of the explanatory hermeneutic of the “school-as-prison.”

[EN]: This article investigates how both Marxian theory and orthodox Marxism have failed to recognise colonialism as a primary contradiction, arguing that, far from constituting a mere epiphenomenon of capitalism, the process lies at its very foundation. Opening with a refutation of a widely-deployed "anti-Eurocentrist" critique, grounded in an analysis of Marxian texts, I demonstrate how Marx's inability to adequately conceptualise both the settler-colonial proletariat and the condition of the enslaved worker have rendered opaque the actual sources of capitalism's internal contradictions. This failure, in turn, has led to an artificial subordination of anti-colonial resistance movements to its own overarching logics, thereby perpetuating a latent and pernicious variety of Eurocentrism. The analysis is subsequently extended and applied to the Romanian context, contending that, despite its economic marginalization within Europe, Romania has played and continues to play an active role within the Euro-American settler-colonial project, contributing to the consolidation of the primary colonial contradiction on a global scale. This involvement, visible at both the rhetorical/diplomatic and material levels, has been hitherto ignored by Romanian political formations broadly adherent to Marxist doctrine, as evidenced by the recent emergence of literature marked by an overt colonial chauvinism that is strikingly similar to its Western counterpart. Ultimately, this study emphasizes the necessity of a radical re-evaluation of Marxist theoretical frameworks by centering anti-colonial analyses over class-based ones, thus aiming to transcend the mythologized dogma of a universal proletariat. [RO]: Acest articol investighează modul în care atât teoria marxiană, cât și marxismul ortodox, au eșuat în recunoașterea colonialismului drept contradicție primară, argumentând că acesta nu constituie un simplu epifenomen al capitalismului, ci se află la bazele sale. Pornind de la o refutare a criticii „anti-eurocentrismului”, fundamentată printr-o analiză a teoriei marxiene, demonstrez cum inabilitatea celei din urmă de a conceptualiza în mod adecvat proletariatul colonial și condiția muncitorului sub sclavie a rezultat într-o opacizare a sursei contradicțiilor interne ale capitalismului, subordonând în mod artificial mișcările de rezistență anti-colonială propriilor logici și perpetuând astfel un eurocentrism latent cu caracter subminator. Analiza este apoi extinsă asupra contextului romanesc, susținând că, în ciuda marginalizării sale economice pe plan european, România a avut și continuă să aibă un rol activ în cadrul proiectului colonial euro-american, contribuind la consolidarea contradicției primare colonialiste la nivel global. Această implicare, vizibilă atât în plan diplomatic cât și material, reprezintă o realitate ignorată de segmente declarativ aderente marxismului românesc, evidențiată prin recenta apariție a unor publicații marcate de un șovinism colonial vădit, foarte similar celui occidental. În final, se subliniază necesitatea unei reevaluări radicale a cadrelor teoretice marxiste prin centrarea analizei anti-coloniale înaintea celei de clasă, având drept scop depășirea dogmei mitologizate a proletariatului universal.