Introduction: Special Issue on Racial Capitalism and Law (original) (raw)

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law

Journal of Law and Political Economy, 2022

Racial capitalism is a conceptual framework that illuminates the relationship between race and class in the global economy. Formulated initially by South African scholars and activists, the theory of racial capitalism has been invoked in recent years by scholars in a variety of disciplines, including law, because it sheds light on seemingly unrelated phenomena, including rampant economic inequality; increasingly militarized policing and border control; the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and others racialized as inferior; the resurgence of right-wing authoritarian ethno-nationalism; the expulsion to the margins of society of growing numbers of humans (including persons who are unemployed, incarcerated, or homeless); and the unprecedented degradation of the ecological systems that support human and non-human life. This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by describing its historical foundations and analyzing what we believe to be its two key structural features: profit-making and race-making, for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, racial segregation, and the creation of sacrifice zones, which reflect the strategies and outcomes of profit-making. The structural features of racial capitalism thus are mutually constitutive: profit-making processes create and reinforce the making of racial meaning, while race-making, underwritten by white supremacy, structures and facilitates the economic processes of profit-making. Together, they constitute a global system dependent on the unbridled extraction of wealth from both humans and nature. Law is deeply implicated in racial capitalism’s profit-making and race-making processes. The article highlights, with concrete examples, the ways that law and legal institutions shape, justify and naturalize the injustices that racial capitalism creates. For example, law defines, in part, what constitutes sovereignty, property, and citizenship; it delineates acceptable levels of environmental degradation; and it determines who is entitled to housing, health care, clean air and water, food, childcare, and a semblance of real freedom and choice (those who can pay). Among the areas of law discussed in the article are property, real estate, labor, immigration, housing, antitrust, trade, investment, environmental, and corporate law – as well as foundational principles of international law (such as sovereignty).

The Three Dialectics of Racial Capitalism: From South Africa to the U.S. and Back Again

Du Bois Review, 2023

The current popularity of "racial capitalism" in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti-and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself.

The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

This introduction to the special issue on "The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism" situates the South African tradition of racial capitalism (SAT) against the organizational backdrop of the anti-apartheid movement, outlines the key theses of the SAT, and presents the contributions of the special issue. We argue that the SAT rests upon four key theses: 1) class struggle from above the pursuit of profit generates racism; 2) the capitalist state is the primary agent of racialization; 3) racial ideology can divide, enabling capitalism, but it can also unify, facilitating resistance; and 4) racial capitalism is a strategic concept that emphasizes the inseparability of anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. The SAT underscores the centrality of struggle and the importance of conjunctural analysis in the study of racial capitalism.

Racial capitalism

"Racial Capitalism", 2019

"Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital-usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration-and framework-from Cedric Robinson's influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of "racial capitalism" as a theoretical project. First, the "racial capitalism" literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by "race" or "capitalism." Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson's insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the "forensics of capital" to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson's concept of "social death."

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.

The South African Pandemic of Racial Capitalism

Monthly Review, 2021

South Africa's COVID-19 responses could well be seen as paradoxical if official statistics were to be confirmed. As of September 2021, the country has recorded over 84,000 COVID-19-related fatalities with fears of a fourth pandemic wave looming. 1 Juxtaposed to the global Western epicenters of the pandemic, such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy, this number seems disproportionately miniscule. Per capita fatalities from COVID-19 are less for South Africa than for all of the G-7 countries except Japan and Canada. However, viewed in the context of the African continent, in which South Africa engages in a colonial-informed discourse emphasizing the country's exceptionalism, what stands out is that the country has the highest number of COVID-19-related fatalities (and the highest number of deaths per capita after Tunisia). Why is it that a country that boasts one of the most sophisticated health systems on the African continent also accounts for the highest number of COVID-19 deaths? The answer is that South Africa's COVID-19 pandemic is one of racial capitalism, entangled with histories of imperial state formation, settler colonialism, and a hierarchical global-neoliberal public policy architecture. Although South African political economist Patrick Bond's analysis concluded that South Africa's post-apartheid settlement shifted from racial to class apartheid, such an observation is in many ways deficient, as the diabolical effects of a hierarchical, racialized political economy persist into the present. The South African political scientist Thiven Reddy argues that, in a colonized society such as South Africa, settled by large numbers of Europeans, the tensions and contradictions emanate primarily from the imposition of racial capitalist relations. 2 Black Studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly defines racial capitalism as a hierarchical political economy constituted by war, militarism, im

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.

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.

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.