This essay argues that the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ can help us understand the connections between seemingly disparate parts of Voltaire’s extensive corpus of work. It contends that even though the Enlightenment’s racial politics abounded with contradictions and ambivalences, Voltaire stood out from his contemporaries. While the connections between his polygenism – the theory that humans of different races were created separately – and material investments in colonial commerce have long been debated by radical historians, this essay (...) suggests that Voltaire’s views about race’s relationship to labour were transformed by France’s colonial losses during the Seven Years’ War. (shrink)

“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.”. (shrink)

The high rate of inequality in South Africa is rooted in colonial dispossession and racial exploitation, and still runs primarily along the racial divide. Policy initiatives taken to redress past economic injustices through the black economic empowerment (BEE) have failed to bring economic transformation. Using the twin lenses of epistemic violence and racial capitalism, this study analyses how entangled interests aimed to co-opt the ruling party elite by the apartheid-era business elite led to the BEE impasse. (...) The pervasiveness of cultural alienation in BEE failure suggests that a shift to restorative justice is necessary to break from the impasse. (shrink)

International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist critique of international economic law. The disciplinary boundaries and operative logic normalised by its denizens corral us in a white, Eurocentric episteme. (...) Ahistoricism, decontextualisation, and externalisation are three epistemic devices at the forefront of the exclusionary discourse of IEL. In this space, the histories and epistemologies of Black peoples are ghettoised, treated as alien to the framework. After identifying this bias, we use the Black Radical Tradition to evaluate IEL’s amenability to the racial capitalism critique. (shrink)

In the influential 1995 article “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Bruce Link and Jo Phelan described social and political factors as “fundamental causes” of death and disease. Whitney Pirtle has recently declared racial capitalism another such fundamental cause. Using the case of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she has argued that racial capitalism's role in that situation meets each of the criteria Link and Phelan's article outlines: racial capitalism influenced multiple disease (...) outcomes, affected disease outcomes through multiple risk factors, involved access to flexible resources that can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease, and was reproduced over time through the continual replacement of intervening mechanisms. We argue for Pirtle's conclusion using the extensive literature on racial capitalism and case studies concerning housing in the United States and Brazil and what Naomi Klein has termed “corona capitalism” in India. If races correspond to hierarchies of material security, as suggested by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, then these hierarchies and their causal effects are fundamental determinants of public health. (shrink)

This essay places Paulo Freire in dialogue with a Black Radical Tradition (BRT) in three distinct yet interrelated ways. First, the paper situates the significance of Cedric’s Robinson’s articulation of a BRT while exploring how contemporary scholars are troubling his disputatious relationship with Marxist social thought. Second, the paper foregrounds Freire’s modest contributions to a BRT in his anticolonial literacy campaigns in Guinea Bissau, Africa. Extending the principles of ‘dialogical cultural action’ in the context of African struggle that Freire documented (...) in the letters compiled in Pedagogy in Process, a robust theorization of solidarity comes into sharper view. Third, the paper calls for further reinvention of Freire pointing to the ways his cogent analysis can be augmented by other racialized groups and radical traditions in solidarity with Black struggle to more explicitly confront the inherent racism and anti-Blackness fundamental to global capitalism. (shrink)

In _The World Computer_ Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest (...) as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle. (shrink)

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense (...) of imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue durée framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, (...) partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left. (shrink)

This article illustrates how racial capitalism can enhance understandings of data, capital, and inequality through an in-depth study of digital platforms used for intervening in gender-based violence. Specifically, we examine an emergent sociotechnical strategy that uses software platforms and artificial intelligence chatbots to offer users emergency assistance, education, and a means to report and build evidence against perpetrators. Our analysis details how two reporting apps construct data to support institutionally legible narratives of violence, highlighting overlooked racialised dimensions of (...) the data capital generated through their use. We draw attention to how they reinforce property relations built on extraction and ownership, capital accumulation that reinforces benefits derived through data property relations and ownership, and the commodification of diversity and inclusion. Recognising these patterns are not unique to anti-violence apps, we reflect on how this example aids in understanding how racial capitalism becomes a constitutive element of digital platforms, which more generally extract information from users, rely on complex financial partnerships, and often sustain problematic relationships with the criminal legal system. We conclude with a discussion of how racial capitalism can advance scholarship at the intersections of data and power. (shrink)

The United States prison system, the largest in the world, operates through both exploitative and rehabilitative modes of discipline. To gain political and public support for the extensive resources expended housing, feeding, and controlling its incarcerated population, the carceral state strategically emphasizes a mix of each mode. Agriculture in prisons is particularly illustrative. With roots in racial capitalism and the carceral state’s criminalization of poverty, plantation convict leasing system, work reform efforts, and punitive and welfarist carceral logics, prison (...) agriculture embodies explicit forms of exploitation and claims of rehabilitation. Accordingly, this article contextualizes and explains results from a nationwide study of state prisons within our framework of the disciplinary matrix. At least 662 adult state prisons have agricultural activities, including an array of animal, food, and plant production. We find that the drivers of these activities are financial, idleness reduction, reparative, and training. Our disciplinary matrix framework departs from conventional assignments of a particular activity to one disciplinary mode or the other and recognizes that any activity may be driven by different prison needs or philosophies. We investigate how different combinations of agricultural activities and drivers rely on discourses of deservingness to naturalize and reproduce structures of racialized, classed, and gendered control inside and outside prison, as well as the legitimacy of the prison system itself. (shrink)

Our contention is that while what may be termed woke capitalism is the result of real changes in both the material structure of capitalism and its ideological superstructure, those are not changes pulling in the same direction. The main material development is the consolidation of the shift from a quasi-deterministic to a more pronouncedly probabilistic nexus of class and race. But it is unclear that this makes much difference to the material prospects of the vast majority of people (...) of color or indeed of people in general. Indeed, the racial permeability of the upper classes is accompanied by an increased and inverse racial permeability of the underclass. Diversification is so elite-driven that it is unlikely to proceed beyond the cosmetic, and for that reason it seems that diversification does not necessarily correspond to any major structural changes in the relations between groups of people, whether we consider them as arranged by class, race, or the intersection of the two. It follows that the politics of representation should not be regarded as a vehicle for the agenda of the materialist left. We propose instead a responsive universalist approach—responsive to racism and all other forms of marginalization and different from the homogenizing universalism of class-only politics. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed the historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis and ethnography of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative, I show how for Palestinians, claiming indigeneity (...) brings into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation and commodification of indigeneity as a racial category narrows notions of indigeneity to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorising from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification. (shrink)

A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities. The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ – indeed, into labour and nothing but labour – which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary prerequisite for the consolidation and perfecting (...) of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract’, and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism. The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general’, depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. The term ‘Black’, which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour. Blackness names that limit. Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure. If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. Consequently, the labour theory of value – which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour – must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour. Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation’, however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/postcolonial sociopolitical order. (shrink)

This paper asks whether and how caste fits into a global history of racial capitalism. The mischaracterisation of caste as custom has long misled analysts and thwarted solidarities. Drawing on the insights of two important bodies of literature, this paper seeks to remedy that misdiagnosis and show that (1) caste abolition must be central to any effective anti-capitalist politics in South Asia, and (2) a focus on ‘local’ systems of racialisation like caste is necessary in any history of (...) global racial capitalism. The two bodies of literature I engage with to achieve these aims are: scholarship on racial capitalism and scholarship on the Indian transition to capitalism. The result is an expanding of the geography of racial capitalism and the centring of caste-based unfreedoms as central to the history of capitalism in the Indian subcontinent. (shrink)

This article examines colonialism, the regime of whiteness, and feminism; it sketches possible genealogies of theories and practices in order to design an aesthetic of radicality or a radical aesthetic that is insurgent and defiant, based on histories and knowledge. We know that aesthetics is a colonial formation that historically and currently privileges the white European bourgeois who could speculate on the beautiful and the good, while genocidal practices and slave trade were carried out from European soil in other parts (...) of the world. Similarly, the Shoah, the still unthinkable genocide that happened on European soil in the twentieth century and shaped the European present, is still, at its base, covered by rhetorically empty constructions of aesthetic perception, practices, and theories. A radical aesthetics must realign all these categories, not only with a cynical gesture of inversion but to situate them categorically and ethically elsewhere. (shrink)

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo-Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, John Marsh's Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality, and Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. His analysis of these books focuses on how each author remains consistent or advances traditional Marxist interpretations of the role of (...) education in capitalist society. In addition, he puts the arguments of each author into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of schooling in a racial capitalist society — what he called caste education — as a way to generate discussion around some of the inherent limitations of Marxist studies of education. Here, Pierce is particularly concerned with the ability of neo-Marxist analyses of the neoliberal restructuring of education to articulate how white supremacy is preserved even in revolutionary critiques of capitalist schooling. (shrink)

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 or 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 do so. It closes by exploring the implications of this claim in relation to recent historical-geographical research on post-1898 US imperialism. (shrink)

This paper develops a political economic explanation of the 2007–9 US subprime crisis which focuses on one of its central causes: the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgage-markets. Until the early 1990s, racial minorities were systematically excluded from mortgage-finance due to bank-redlining and discrimination. But, then, racial exclusion in credit-markets was transformed: racial minorities were increasingly given access to housing-credit under terms far more adverse than were offered to non-minority borrowers. This paper shows that the (...) emergence of the subprime loan is linked, in turn, to the strategic transformation of banking in the 1980s, and to the unique global circumstances of the US macro-economy. Thus, subprime lending emerged from a combination of the long US history of racial exclusion in credit-markets, the crisis of US banking, and the position of the US within the global economy. From the viewpoint of the capitalist accumulation-process, these loans increased the depth of the financial expropriation of the working class by financial capital. The crisis in subprime lending then emerged when subprime loans with exploitative terms became more widespread and were made increasingly on an under-collateralised basis – that is, when housing-loans became not just extortionary but speculative. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of U.S. farmland owners, operators, and workers by race, ethnicity, and gender. We first review the intersection between racialized and gendered capitalism and farmland ownership and farming in the United States. Then we analyze data from the 2014 Tenure and Ownership Agricultural Land survey, the 2012 Census of Agriculture, and the 2013–2014 National Agricultural Worker Survey to demonstrate that significant nation-wide disparities in farming by race, ethnicity and gender persist in the U.S. In 2012–2014, (...) White people owned 98% and operated 94% of all farmland. They generated 98% of all farm-related income from land ownership and 97% of income from farm owner-operatorship. Meanwhile, People of Color farmers were more likely to be tenants rather than owners, owned less land, and generated less farm-related wealth per person than their White counterparts. Hispanic farmers were also disproportionately farm laborers. In addition to racial and ethnic disparities, there were disparities by gender. About 63% of non-operating landowners, 86% of farm operators, and 87% of tenant farmers were male, and female farmers tended to generate less income per farmer than men. This data provides evidence of ongoing racial, ethnic and gender disparities in agriculture in the United States. We conclude with a call to address the structural drivers of the disparities and with recommendations for better data collection. (shrink)

In this paper, we take up the call to further examine structural injustice in health, and racial inequalities in particular. We examine the many facets of racism: structural, interpersonal and institutional as they appeared in the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, and emphasize the relevance of their systemic character. We suggest that such inequalities were entirely foreseeable, for their causal mechanisms are deeply ingrained in our social structures. It is by recognizing the conventional, un-extraordinary nature of racism within social (...) systems that we can begin to address socially mediated health inequalities. (shrink)

In this paper, three racialized social work educators unsettle our settled colonial silences as acts of self-decolonization and as a way of responding to the call to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Hailing from the uneven manifestations of global capitalism and coloniality in Morocco, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, we draw on various critical theories to interrogate our unique entanglements with the imperial project of entwined settler colonialism and white supremacy. We narrate our embodied coloniality and how (...) the virulent materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession plays out in each of our personal stories, everyday encounters, and practices as educators. With the aim of teaching for social justice by modeling, we share the processes of unsettling our colonial settlerhood and puncturing our racialized innocence. Each story addresses three themes: contact and colonial relations with Indigenous peoples of Canada, complicity in global coloniality, and responsibility in responding to the TRC call to action. The first story provides a broad outline of our struggles with the Indigenous/Settler binary created to perpetuate the various forms of displacement and dispossession in settler colonialism. The second story probes the complexities in the Settler category by engaging difference-making as a central technology of dispossession. The third story probes the complexities in the Indigenous category through interrogating the perils and promises of recognition and reconciliation in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global Indigenous resistance. We conclude bymoving beyond our divergent trajectories and offering shared critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work. (shrink)

This review article engages with a rich field of scholarship on logistics that has gathered momentum over the past decade, focusing on two new publications by Laleh Khalili and Martín Arboleda. It contextualizes how and why logistics is bound up with the militarization of contemporary political and social life. I argue that the later 20th century rise of logistics can be better understood as both a response to and symptom of capitalist crisis and I situate this scholarship on war and (...) logistics in relationship to Giovanni Arrighi’s account of crisis and ‘unravelling hegemony’. I also show how logistics provides essential critical and visual resources that contribute to efforts to map global capitalism and to debates on totality and class composition in contemporary critical theory. Finally, contemporary events such as the ongoing Coronavirus crisis and the reemergence of Black Lives Matter are considered in light of this analysis with reference to the centrality of logistics to racial capitalism. (shrink)

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, (...) socialism, welfare capitalism, andlibertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. (shrink)

This paper develops a political economic explanation of the 2007–9 US subprime crisis which focuses on one of its central causes: the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgage-markets. Until the early 1990s, racial minorities were systematically excluded from mortgage-finance due to bank-redlining and discrimination. But, then, racial exclusion in credit-markets was transformed: racial minorities were increasingly given access to housing-credit under terms far more adverse than were offered to non-minority borrowers. This paper shows that the (...) emergence of the subprime loan is linked, in turn, to the strategic transformation of banking in the 1980s, and to the unique global circumstances of the US macro-economy. Thus, subprime lending emerged from a combination of the long US history of racial exclusion in credit-markets, the crisis of US banking, and the position of the US within the global economy. From the viewpoint of the capitalist accumulation-process, these loans increased the depth of the financial expropriation of the working class by financial capital. The crisis in subprime lending then emerged when subprime loans with exploitative terms became more widespread and were made increasingly on an under-collateralised basis – that is, when housing-loans became not just extortionary but speculative. (shrink)

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.1"In the antiblack world there is but one race, and that race is black. Thus, to be racialized is to be pushed 'down,' toward blackness, and to be deracialized (...) is to be pushed 'up' toward whiteness." This does not mean, of course, that there are only blacks and whites in some anthropological sense. It does not mean that political reality with regard to race simply reduces to two positions... (shrink)

Systems of oppression function by exploiting the most vulnerable amongst us. Where these oppressive systems overlap, the victims are pitted against one another. Slaughterhouses provide a particularly brutal example, wherein speciesism, capitalism, and carcerality intersect at the expense of their collective victims. In a dozen compelling essays from around the world, Vegan Entanglements: Dismantling Racial and Carceral Capitalism examines the ways human and animal bodies are controlled, manipulated, and sectioned within a system that commodifies labor, production, and (...) individual beings for profit. The book is divided into four sections: 1: The Intersection(s) Between Prison- and Animal-Industrial Complexes; 2: Critical Animal Geographies and the Panopticon; 3: Law, Veganism, and the Carceral State; and 4: Fighting for Our Collective Liberation with Consistent Anti-Oppression. (shrink)

Cedric J. Robinson and others have criticized “Marxism” for “its inability to comprehend either the racial character of capitalism…or mass movements outside Europe.” Whatever the merits of this criticism for “standard Marxism,” Marx’s own thought is neither “economistic” nor Eurocentric, it does not deny historical agency to the struggle against anti-black racism in its own right, and it does not reduce that struggle to the European class struggle. By exploring Marx’s Civil War journalism and correspondence as well as (...) his critique of political economy, this essay demonstrates that Marx’s philosophy of liberation conceptualizes the revolutionary struggle to abolish slavery as an epoch-making worldhistorical freedom struggle, both as a Black liberation movement and also as a necessarycondition for the development of the international working class. A little known Blackled revolt in Bolivar, Missouri in 1859 is Marx’s clue to the meaning and significance of the American Civil War. (shrink)

Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay (...) draws upon Anwar Shaikh and Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism. (shrink)

Classic feminist social theory highlights the exploitation of women’s labor in capitalist societies traditionally through an examination of how housework and childcare is perceived and organized, excluding an explicit analysis of older adult care work. In light of the surge in the demand for older adult caregiving over the last several decades, this paper uses older adult care work as a new lens to understand how gender, and its intersections with other critical identities such as race, ethnicity, and nativity, are (...) a basis for continued exploitation and marginalization in modern capitalist systems. Building on Marxist feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s work on social value and domination, I argue that women’s care labor, both paid and unpaid, is an instrument of capital accumulation that differentially exploits women based on key intersectional identities. An examination of the system of older adult care work in the United States allows us to see the multilayered and complex system of exploitation that creates and institutionalizes existing social hierarchies as capitalism seeks to expand. The paper ends with a discussion of two potential family care paths America could conceivably pursue in the coming years; one toward increased commodification of care work in line with neoliberal capitalism, and the other toward more comprehensive social welfare policies that alleviate women’s reproductive labor burden and begin to break down gendered and racialized hierarchies. (shrink)

Starting with the acknowledgment of the necessity of radical imagination for social change, and with the threat that neoliberal capitalism poses to radical imagination, our hope is that this themed issue offers the time and space to cultivate radical imagination as it takes up questions of racial justice. Moreover, our intent is to solicit critical phenomenology toward robust investigations of radical imagination, what it makes possible, and the ways in which current social, economic, and political arrangements sustain or (...) foreclose the space and time for its cultivation. What the past few years have made clear is that individuals and institutions continue to be complicit in the perpetuation of structural inequality and racial violence in our society. For us, the editors of Puncta, acknowledging this complicity means at a minimum to use our platform to amplify the voices of scholars of color and establish a forum devoted to critical conversations about racial justice. In sum, we hope we can create a space-time for the cultivation of radical imagination. This themed issue strives to be such a venue; the ten articles featured in this issue explore the intersections of race/racialization with methodological concerns within the field of critical phenomenology, theoretical understandings of the notion of race itself, and demands for racial justice on scholarly, activist, and imaginary grounds. (shrink)

This article revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood, a debate that prefigured many of the central contradictions of the black-power era. Their exchange followed Cruse’s influential 1962 essay forStudies on the Left, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American’, which declared that the American Negro was a ‘subject of domestic colonialism’. Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil-rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the (...) younger activists who would give birth to the black-power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journalSoulbook, Haywood criticised Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-capitalism. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left-political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding and contesting those commonsensical notions of African-American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished social context and political realities of the twentieth-century racial ghetto. (shrink)

We examine the emergence of the ‘postfeminist’ sensibility from feminist theory and praxis, and its relation and relevance to education. Analytical frameworks such as postfeminism and intersectionality have given equal weight to recognition-based struggles, such as those based on sexual, racial, class-based, gender-related identities. We follow Nancy Fraser’s argument that these identity-based movements have been co-opted by neoliberal politicians and bureaucratic policy-makers, and become a divide and rule strategy, neglecting the subjugating power of capital. Beginning with third-wave feminism’s emphasis (...) on individual identity, women’s struggles have been become a part of the greater parisitic neoliberal project. We consider the implications of this docile and domesticated feminism for the education of women. (shrink)

This volume looks at how accumulation in postcolonial capitalism blurs the boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on one hand, and creates zones and corridors on the other. It draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. From these two major inquiries it develops a new understanding of postcolonial capitalism. The case studies from India and Sri Lanka discuss the (...) production of urban spaces of capital extraction, institutionalization of postcolonial finance capital, gendering of work forms, establishment of new forms of labour, formation of and changes in caste and racial identities and networks, and securitization-and thereby confirm that no study of contemporary capitalism is complete without thoroughly addressing the postcolonial condition. By challenging the established dualities between citizenship-based civil society and welfare-based political society, exploring critically the question of colonial and postcolonial difference, and foregrounding the material processes of accumulation against the culturalism of postcolonial studies, this volume redefines postcolonial studies in South Asia and beyond. It is invaluable reading for students and scholars of South Asian studies, sociology, cultural and critical anthropology, critical and praxis studies, and political science. (shrink)

Why do racist oppression and capitalist exploitation often seem so inescapable and intractable? To describe and explain adequately the persistence of racist ideology, to specify its role in the maintenance of racial capitalism, and to imagine the conditions of its abolition, we must understand racist ideology as a form of false consciousness. False consciousness gets things “right” at the level of appearance, but it mistakes that appearance for a “deep” or essential truth. This chapter articulates a novel, positive (...) account of first-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about the world that are sustained and superficially justified by objective social arrangements, and of second-order false consciousness, which occurs in the case of false beliefs about how one has come to hold the beliefs that one does. To dismantle racist ideology requires political movements that craft theoretical interventions highlighting the inessentiality and contingency of despised racial groups’ oppressed status, as well as practical interventions aimed at directly undermining the oppressive conditions that are reflected in racist beliefs about the “naturalness” or “appropriateness” of these groups’ degraded status. (shrink)

This article highlights the impasses of anti-racist struggles that understand racism as an opinion or a prejudice and use education as their only means for addressing it. Racism should rather be understood as a socio-historical subjective structure rooted in the process of constitution of the division of labour on a global scale through colonialism, a process that was crucial to the institution of capitalism. This is why we will put forth the importance of rejecting the narrations that camouflage colonization (...) with the idea of civilization, and the necessity to produce decolonial counter-histories. We will thus claim that such an endeavor should start from the struggles of racialized peoples against the different forms of coloniality—that is, from the refusal by racialized peoples of the representations that are imposed on them, and from their repositioning on the basis of their alterity. Only the position of a powerful alterity can in fact make possible a real equality.Cet article met en évidence les impasses des luttes antiracistes qui conçoivent le racisme comme une opinion ou un préjugé et utilisent l’éducation comme le seul moyen d’y remédier. Le racisme devrait plutôt être compris comme une structure socio-historique subjective qui s’enracine dans le procès de constitution de la division mondiale du travail par le colonialisme, un procès qui a été décisif pour l’institution du capitalisme. C’est pourquoi nous mettrons en avant le caractère problématique des récits qui recouvrent la colonisation de l’idée de civilisation et la nécessité de produire des contre-histoires décoloniales. Il s’agira alors de montrer que, pour ce faire, il faut partir des luttes des racisés contre les différentes formes de colonialité—c’est-à-dire du refus par les racisés des représentations qui leur sont adressées et de leur repositionnement à partir de leur altérité. Seule la position d’une altérité puissante peut, en effet, rendre possible une égalité réelle. (shrink)

Since the publication of J. A. Hobson’s (1858–1940) Imperialism: A Study in 1902, the text has been studied—even celebrated—as a liberal or proto-Marxist critique of modern empires. This reputation stands in some tension with the text itself, which defends various forms of imperial domination. While scholars have addressed this tension, they remain divided over how best to understand Hobson’s imperial commitments. Offering a new response to this debate, I argue that a key dimension of Imperialism has been overlooked—namely, Hobson’s conception (...) of humanity as stratified into a hierarchy of racial “souls.” This deeply committed view of human difference undergirded Hobson’s arguments about the moral and practical limits of Western imperial power. This article shows how Hobson articulated imperialism as the “parasitic” rule of whites over the nonwhite world—the solution to which was not the rejection of empire but the reform of white imperial power in accordance with his normative vision of global racial hierarchy. This recovery reveals the redemptive critique at the core of Imperialism and enables us to more readily grasp the text as a form of imperial apologetics. The article concludes with the suggestion that Hobson is better understood not as a liberal- or socialist-imperialist but as a proponent of racial capitalism on a global scale. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (...) (2000), which characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)