How Racism Shaped, Shapes, And Will Shape Modern States and Capitalism: A Literature Review (original) (raw)

Race, Capitalism, and World Politics

Introduction We live in a world of brutal racialized violence and massive economic inequality. How did the world get this way? How does a violent past continue to exert force on the present? How are racialized violence and inequality related? Can these global conditions be changed? This course tackles these questions through the lens of global racial capitalism. Global racial capitalism means three things. First, capitalism is more than just the study of economic markets. It is a way of organizing life and society that shapes how we act and think politically. Second, racism extends beyond individual prejudice. It is deeply ingrained in this social organization we call capitalism. Finally, this system has always involved politics that extends across borders. It brings people into contact through imperialism, colonialism, warfare, trade, and cultural exchange. This course wagers that this historical and theoretical perspective gives us a better window into understanding our unequal and violent present by looking at how race, class, and power function across borders. Structure of the Course The course proceeds more or less historically, with a majority of our time spent on rethinking the global politics of the 20th century from the perspective of the Global South. We begin by discussing the relationship between racism and capitalism in the 19th century. Here our readings deal with slavery, revolution, and settler colonialism. Though our course proceeds historically, each of the authors that we engage with in the first part of this course demonstrate in different ways how the racial capitalist past is also our present. Our next section rethinks the politics of the first half of the 20th century by focusing on World War and fascism from below. We then turn to what we think of today as the Cold War. From the perspective of those in the Global South, the Cold War was not Cold – nor was the Cold War a distinct phase in global politics. Instead, the Cold War was a time of extreme global racial violence, upheaval, decolonization, and neo-colonialism. In our final part of the course, we will think through how the history of racial capitalism that we’ve learned throughout the course shapes the politics of our present and future. Here we will examine the politics of “Endless War”, policing, homocapitalism and homonationalism, and the potential for fascist revivals in our present.

Syllabus Racial Capitalism – Historical Explorations

“Racial capitalism” recently emerged as an orientation in research uniting economic, social, and cultural analysis. In the course, we explore the potential and limits an intersecting use of the analytical lenses of “capitalism” and “race” implies for historical scholarship. For that purpose, we engage with debates in sociology, political theory, anthropology, political economy, and cultural studies, yet we do so with an eye on historical specificity. In the process, we will address fundamental questions: what are race and racism? What is capitalism? Have the specific social interdependencies that characterize capitalism a tendency to overcome racial boundaries or do these interdependencies, on the contrary, engender ever-new forms of racialization? The course consists of four parts. In an introductory section, we learn about the origin and development of key terms. A second part is concerned with the history of transatlantic slavery and the role it played for industrial modernity. A third part explores colonialism, its relations and legacies, with respect to globalization, property, and labor. In the fourth part, we examine racial ideas about capitalism, such as in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on “Jewish finance” or in anti-Asian racism.

True colors of global economy: In the shadows of racialized capitalism

Organization

This paper unpacks the notion of racial capitalism and highlights its salience for Management and Organization Studies. Racial capitalism is a process of systematically deriving socio-economic value from non-white racial identity groups, and has shaped the contours and trajectories of capitalism for over 500 years. Drawing on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Bourdieu, and a number of labor historians, we argue that whiteness operates as symbolic capital and status property in market conditions, and is therefore responsible for perpetuating economic inequalities along color lines all over the world. We demonstrate how the extra value placed on whiteness can create a shadowland of split labor markets, colorism, and transnational patterns of expropriation that systematically disadvantage populations of color.

Race in the Capitalist World-System: Response to Symposium Essays

Journal of World-Systems Research, 2016

The articles assembled in this collection speak to a desperately needed debate and theoretical advancement on matters of race, national oppression, ethnicity and global capitalism. What is most intriguing about this collection is that the authors do not fear stepping into the realm of supposed heresy. They are prepared to ask tough questions and advance, in some cases, unorthodox assertions and conclusions. This, alone, makes this entire collection a must-read. The challenge in addressing the question of race revolves around appreciating that it cannot be restricted to matters of color, superiority/inferiority or hierarchy. Race is a system created with two objectives, as well articulated by several of the authors, which include: one, domination and exploitation for a specific population, and, two, social control. To a great extent this latter matter of social control was not addressed directly in this collection though was implicit in several essays. In William Robinson's introduction, he quotes the iconic Oliver Cromwell Cox as situating the construction of modern racism in the period of 1493-4. I would suggest shifting that at least one year earlier to 1492 with the successful "Reconquista" carried out by the Castilians in Spain. This was the removal of the last of the Moorish kingdoms from Iberia and the expulsion of Jews. It was in this moment, as Etienne Balibar pointed out in his volume (with Immanuel Wallerstein) Race, Nation, Class, that we witnessed the merging, to a great degree of Christianity and a new concept of whiteness. This construction of race was further developed in the 15 th century by a combination of the Spanish and Portuguese invasion of the Western Hemisphere (and subsequent genocide, as noted by Fenelon), the slave trade in Africans, and the English subjugation of Ireland New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.

Race, Capitalism, and the Necessity/Contingency Debate

Theory, Culture & Society, 2023

Interest in the relationship between race and the expanded reproduction of capitalism has exploded across the social sciences and humanities over the past several years. Despite this widespread appreciation and interest, profound disagreement, debate, and analytical impression persists, not least regarding the relationship between race and the necessary “laws of motion” of capitalist society. This article begins by tracing the core approaches to the race and capitalism conversation, paying particular attention to their understanding of the necessity/contingency distinction. It then proceeds to make the case for race as a contingent – which, emphatically, does not mean local nor insignificant – relatively autonomous, and historically path-dependent terrain of struggle in capitalist society, which has largely functioned to maintain capital’s necessary disequilibrium between the value form and its value relations, but need not. It closes by exploring the implications of this claim in relation to recent historical-geographical research on post-1898 US imperialism.

True colorsof global economy: In the shadows of racialized capitalism

Organization, 2021

This paper unpacks the notion of racial capitalism and highlights its salience for Management and Organization Studies. Racial capitalism is a process of systematically deriving socioeconomic value from non-white racial identity groups, and has shaped the contours and trajectories of capitalism for over 500 years. Drawing on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Bourdieu, and a number of labor historians, we argue that whiteness operates as symbolic capital and status property in market conditions, and is therefore responsible for perpetuating economic inequalities along color lines all over the world. We demonstrate how the extra value placed on whiteness can create a shadowland of split labor markets, colorism, and transnational patterns of expropriation that systematically disadvantage populations of color.

Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism

Sociological Theory, 2021

This essay assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. It highlights three tensions within the existing literature: (1) whether "race" as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, (2) whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept "racial capitalism" and (3) whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity. Existing discussions of racial capitalism implicitly or explicitly raise these tensions but they do not adequately resolve them. Nonetheless, they remain important for generating further theory and research.

Racial capitalism, uneven development, and the abstractive powers of race and money

EPA: Economy and Space, 2023

How does the circulation of capital in the form of money and finance mobilize different constructions of "Blackness" across historical-geographical contexts, and how does this produce uneven development? This contribution offers theoretical and methodological provocations to think about this question, drawing on two cases of raced finance: race-based bank lending in the United States, and international investment to sub-Saharan countries. I argue that the impersonal character of social domination under capitalism, expressed in and by the movement of abstract categories (such as the commodity, value, money, the state) requires that we carefully mobilize the notion of abstraction in theorizing the co-production of racialized difference and uneven development. I develop this conceptual argument by way of a sympathetic yet critical engagement with recent scholarship on racial capitalism, and by bringing the critique of political economy into conversation with the Black radical tradition. The key question is not the extent to which cases of raced finance exhibit a paradigmatic "anti-Blackness." Rather, it is about how the abstractive powers of race and the social forms of capital refract each other in violent configurations, and contribute to giving the capitalist production of space a raced imprint. The co-production of racialized and spatial difference thus enhances processes of capitalist discipline and extraction mediated by money, while the totalizing operations of money reproduce racialized power relations and uneven development. I then turn to the work of Bhandar and Toscano to reflect methodologically on how to mobilize various levels and modalities of abstraction in concrete research.