Histories of Racial Capitalism

IF 0.3 Q4 INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR
Mary Poole
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Nonetheless, without the global context, US histories of racial capitalism can suffer from misalignment with Indigenous dispossession and settler colonization, erasing Indigenous people from land and from history.Histories of Racial Capitalism breaks from that beaten path. This outstanding book makes a modest claim to demonstrate through history that race is constitutive of capitalism. In fact, it does much more than that. It models a number of specific approaches, a new “methodological practice,” that repositions US racial capitalism in the broader history of global colonization (10).Racial capitalism is defined here not as a subfield of the study of capitalism but as the “process by which the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, contract/coercion, and others—become articulated through race” (10). The process has two entwined parts: violent dispossession leads to the creation of new racial distinctions, which in turn naturalizes racial inequalities. This understanding of racial capitalism as a dynamic process contrasts with the earlier Black radical tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Fields, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson. This book draws heavily on that foundation but charts a new course that disengages from the “race first” or “class first” debate (10). While this new iteration critiques capitalism in a Marxist tradition, it rejects Marx's progressive theory of history. Borrowing from Patrick Wolfe, racial capitalism is presented here not as an event but as a “structuring logic,” one in which primitive accumulation is not a stage of capitalist development but “an ongoing organizing principle of capitalist social order” (11).Debt is a theme that demonstrates this continuity. K-Sue Park describes debt as a weapon in the hands of British settlers, who gained title to Indigenous peoples’ lands through loan defaults. Race was thus imagined into being as a means to facilitate unequal power between Indigenous people that held legal rights to land and European settlers. Thus, it was in the era of formal colonization that the mechanism of debt was invented for displacement in America. Land itself was transformed from a living thing to a commodity. In his essay, Destin Jenkins demonstrates the role of debt in the realignment of the white North and South after the end of Reconstruction. The South faced two main challenges to securing northern investment: Jim Crow segregation led to racial violence; and southern cities had defaulted on loans during and after the Civil War and had to convince northern investors that future investment was secure. Borrowing became a property of whiteness through propaganda to establish credibility in white loan repayment, what Du Bois called a “worldwide investment in color prejudice” (187). The propaganda obscured the necessity of Black labor to the New South economy. In both of these examples, debt was a means of producing race, and race nimbly adapted to this historical context.Several chapters explore the interrelatedness of the commodification of land and of labor. Ryan Cecil Jobson reads Du Bois's Black Reconstruction as a critical theory of energy. Manu Karuka also looks to Black Reconstruction and the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad to reveal the role of the new industrial mining and agriculture economy in the southwestern region in the defeat of Reconstruction. Land was at the heart of this counterrevolution in property, as finance capital and the US Army brought a transfer of power from the old slaveholding oligarchy to new agribusiness (137). The story includes the displacement of the Quechan and other Indigenous peoples from the Colorado River in the course of a new “layering” of colonization. Karuka sees in Du Bois's analysis “guidance for a critique of settler colonialism” (135). However, such a critique should engage with the layering of colonization of the land in the Southeast coveted by freedmen, which for Du Bois would form the basis of the multiracial democracy. That land would have embedded the “fossilized labor” of the six tribes illegally and violently removed just decades before. The book as a whole creates space for alignment of racial capitalism and settler colonialism through its approach to periodization. All the chapters demonstrate a continuity of colonization. The book critiques an automatic assumption of the legitimacy of US law on top of occupied land.Shauna Sweeney offers another possible avenue to alignment with Indigenous histories, arguing that Black women contributed to the Black radical tradition by sustaining spirituality, including spiritual connectedness to land. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, she says it was maroonage, flight from slavery, that birthed a “political philosophy at odds with racial capitalism” (65).Sweeney's chapter is also the only one that recognizes gender, which is a serious flaw. Gender, among other things, is a Western cultural production invented for the explicit purpose of producing racial capitalism. Using this definition, gender, like race, is created anew in multiple contexts to make invisible the extraction of labor value from certain human beings also inevitably defined by race. Sweeney's chapter demonstrates that gender understood in this way leads to new and necessary ways of knowing the Black radical tradition.That point notwithstanding, one of the most exciting elements of this book is its presentation of race as a multiplicity of local articulations. Thus, though it focuses primarily on America and its colonies, it decenters that history within a larger story of global colonization. Mishal Khan describes the stratification of labor under colonization in India as one example of this. Interestingly, Khan argues that the Western movement for abolition of slavery, and the “vocabulary of freedom” it promoted, led to new forms of bonded labor in India and thus to new racializations. Allen Lumba finds a fascinating resonance between the logic of US settler-colonial policy and that deployed in the “extractive colonies,” including the Philippines (112). Pedro Regalado describes the seizure of racial capital by Latinx elites by manipulating “the racial malleability of ‘Hispanicity’” to produce themselves as a (new) racial category distinct from others defined as “black” (233). While this chapter is place bound within the United States, it probes a theme of racial stratification within “races” that resonates with Global South experience.Together, the stories presented in this book call for a challenge to the progressive narrative of Western history itself, articulated most directly by Justin Leroy. What racial capitalism offers is a “productive” contradiction that exposes the progressive narrative to be in fact a product of capitalism, because the functioning of what we identify as racial capitalism is not just a means to “hyperexploitation” of people identified racially; it is “how race naturalizes the tensions inherent to capitalism's logic of forward progress” (180). Racial capitalism “offers itself as a black philosophy of history” that is inherently “a rebellion against strict periodization” (181). To apply this insight is to approach anew the meaning of emancipation with fresh questions. Leroy suggests that “if slavery is capitalism, then of course abolition would be communism” (180). Abolition might also be a reknitting of people and land through a society built on the model of the maroon communities, and on a view of land as alive within Indigenous epistemologies rather than as a lifeless commodity.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"311 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581489","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS & LABOR","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

As one of many examples of academic theory borrowed from social movements, “racial capitalism” was first articulated by anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Racial capitalism is thus the product of a global system of colonization, and “race” itself a multiplicity of expressions. Histories of racial capitalism produced in the United States, however, have tended to remain contained within the United States and a Black/white definition of race. That story begins with slavery and moves through emancipation, segregation, redlining, and the creation of racial geographies and structural mechanisms of the production of property in whiteness. This is all essential work. Nonetheless, without the global context, US histories of racial capitalism can suffer from misalignment with Indigenous dispossession and settler colonization, erasing Indigenous people from land and from history.Histories of Racial Capitalism breaks from that beaten path. This outstanding book makes a modest claim to demonstrate through history that race is constitutive of capitalism. In fact, it does much more than that. It models a number of specific approaches, a new “methodological practice,” that repositions US racial capitalism in the broader history of global colonization (10).Racial capitalism is defined here not as a subfield of the study of capitalism but as the “process by which the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, contract/coercion, and others—become articulated through race” (10). The process has two entwined parts: violent dispossession leads to the creation of new racial distinctions, which in turn naturalizes racial inequalities. This understanding of racial capitalism as a dynamic process contrasts with the earlier Black radical tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Fields, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson. This book draws heavily on that foundation but charts a new course that disengages from the “race first” or “class first” debate (10). While this new iteration critiques capitalism in a Marxist tradition, it rejects Marx's progressive theory of history. Borrowing from Patrick Wolfe, racial capitalism is presented here not as an event but as a “structuring logic,” one in which primitive accumulation is not a stage of capitalist development but “an ongoing organizing principle of capitalist social order” (11).Debt is a theme that demonstrates this continuity. K-Sue Park describes debt as a weapon in the hands of British settlers, who gained title to Indigenous peoples’ lands through loan defaults. Race was thus imagined into being as a means to facilitate unequal power between Indigenous people that held legal rights to land and European settlers. Thus, it was in the era of formal colonization that the mechanism of debt was invented for displacement in America. Land itself was transformed from a living thing to a commodity. In his essay, Destin Jenkins demonstrates the role of debt in the realignment of the white North and South after the end of Reconstruction. The South faced two main challenges to securing northern investment: Jim Crow segregation led to racial violence; and southern cities had defaulted on loans during and after the Civil War and had to convince northern investors that future investment was secure. Borrowing became a property of whiteness through propaganda to establish credibility in white loan repayment, what Du Bois called a “worldwide investment in color prejudice” (187). The propaganda obscured the necessity of Black labor to the New South economy. In both of these examples, debt was a means of producing race, and race nimbly adapted to this historical context.Several chapters explore the interrelatedness of the commodification of land and of labor. Ryan Cecil Jobson reads Du Bois's Black Reconstruction as a critical theory of energy. Manu Karuka also looks to Black Reconstruction and the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad to reveal the role of the new industrial mining and agriculture economy in the southwestern region in the defeat of Reconstruction. Land was at the heart of this counterrevolution in property, as finance capital and the US Army brought a transfer of power from the old slaveholding oligarchy to new agribusiness (137). The story includes the displacement of the Quechan and other Indigenous peoples from the Colorado River in the course of a new “layering” of colonization. Karuka sees in Du Bois's analysis “guidance for a critique of settler colonialism” (135). However, such a critique should engage with the layering of colonization of the land in the Southeast coveted by freedmen, which for Du Bois would form the basis of the multiracial democracy. That land would have embedded the “fossilized labor” of the six tribes illegally and violently removed just decades before. The book as a whole creates space for alignment of racial capitalism and settler colonialism through its approach to periodization. All the chapters demonstrate a continuity of colonization. The book critiques an automatic assumption of the legitimacy of US law on top of occupied land.Shauna Sweeney offers another possible avenue to alignment with Indigenous histories, arguing that Black women contributed to the Black radical tradition by sustaining spirituality, including spiritual connectedness to land. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, she says it was maroonage, flight from slavery, that birthed a “political philosophy at odds with racial capitalism” (65).Sweeney's chapter is also the only one that recognizes gender, which is a serious flaw. Gender, among other things, is a Western cultural production invented for the explicit purpose of producing racial capitalism. Using this definition, gender, like race, is created anew in multiple contexts to make invisible the extraction of labor value from certain human beings also inevitably defined by race. Sweeney's chapter demonstrates that gender understood in this way leads to new and necessary ways of knowing the Black radical tradition.That point notwithstanding, one of the most exciting elements of this book is its presentation of race as a multiplicity of local articulations. Thus, though it focuses primarily on America and its colonies, it decenters that history within a larger story of global colonization. Mishal Khan describes the stratification of labor under colonization in India as one example of this. Interestingly, Khan argues that the Western movement for abolition of slavery, and the “vocabulary of freedom” it promoted, led to new forms of bonded labor in India and thus to new racializations. Allen Lumba finds a fascinating resonance between the logic of US settler-colonial policy and that deployed in the “extractive colonies,” including the Philippines (112). Pedro Regalado describes the seizure of racial capital by Latinx elites by manipulating “the racial malleability of ‘Hispanicity’” to produce themselves as a (new) racial category distinct from others defined as “black” (233). While this chapter is place bound within the United States, it probes a theme of racial stratification within “races” that resonates with Global South experience.Together, the stories presented in this book call for a challenge to the progressive narrative of Western history itself, articulated most directly by Justin Leroy. What racial capitalism offers is a “productive” contradiction that exposes the progressive narrative to be in fact a product of capitalism, because the functioning of what we identify as racial capitalism is not just a means to “hyperexploitation” of people identified racially; it is “how race naturalizes the tensions inherent to capitalism's logic of forward progress” (180). Racial capitalism “offers itself as a black philosophy of history” that is inherently “a rebellion against strict periodization” (181). To apply this insight is to approach anew the meaning of emancipation with fresh questions. Leroy suggests that “if slavery is capitalism, then of course abolition would be communism” (180). Abolition might also be a reknitting of people and land through a society built on the model of the maroon communities, and on a view of land as alive within Indigenous epistemologies rather than as a lifeless commodity.
种族资本主义的历史
所有章节都展示了殖民的连续性。这本书批评了在占领区之上自动假定美国法律合法性的做法。Shauna Sweeney提供了另一种与土著历史保持一致的可能途径,她认为黑人妇女通过维持精神,包括与土地的精神联系,为黑人激进传统做出了贡献。她借鉴了塞德里克·罗宾逊(Cedric Robinson)的观点,说正是在逃离奴隶制的逃亡生活中,诞生了“与种族资本主义格格不入的政治哲学”(65页)。斯威尼的章节也是唯一一个承认性别的章节,这是一个严重的缺陷。性别,在其他事物中,是一种西方文化产物,其发明的明确目的是制造种族资本主义。使用这一定义,性别就像种族一样,在多种语境中被重新创造出来,使从某些同样不可避免地由种族定义的人类身上榨取劳动价值的行为变得不可见。斯威尼的这一章表明,以这种方式理解性别,为了解黑人激进传统提供了新的、必要的途径。尽管如此,这本书最令人兴奋的元素之一是它将种族表现为多种地方发音。因此,尽管它主要关注美国及其殖民地,但它将这段历史置于一个更大的全球殖民故事中。Mishal Khan将印度殖民时期的劳动力分层描述为一个例子。有趣的是,可汗认为,西方废除奴隶制的运动,以及它所倡导的“自由词汇”,导致了印度新形式的抵押劳动,从而导致了新的种族化。艾伦·伦巴(Allen Lumba)在美国移民-殖民政策的逻辑与包括菲律宾在内的“掠夺性殖民地”的逻辑之间发现了令人着迷的共鸣(112)。佩德罗·雷加拉多(Pedro Regalado)描述了拉丁裔精英通过操纵“‘西班牙裔’的种族可塑性”来攫取种族资本,使他们自己成为一个(新的)种族类别,与其他被定义为“黑人”的种族类别截然不同(233)。虽然这一章的地点限定在美国,但它探讨了“种族”内部的种族分层主题,这与全球南方的经验产生了共鸣。总之,这本书中的故事呼吁对西方历史本身的进步叙事提出挑战,贾斯汀·勒罗伊(Justin Leroy)最直接地阐述了这一点。种族资本主义提供的是一种“生产性”矛盾,它揭示了进步叙事实际上是资本主义的产物,因为我们所认为的种族资本主义的功能不仅仅是对种族认同的人进行“过度剥削”的手段;它是“种族如何使资本主义前进的逻辑所固有的紧张关系自然化”(180)。种族资本主义“提供了一种黑人历史哲学”,本质上是“对严格的时期化的反叛”(181)。运用这种洞见,就是用新的问题重新审视解放的意义。Leroy认为“如果奴隶制是资本主义,那么废除奴隶制当然就是共产主义”(180)。废除奴隶制也可能是通过建立在栗色社区模式上的社会,以及在土著认识论中将土地视为有生命的而不是无生命的商品的观点,来重新编织人与土地。
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