Racial Capitalism and the Grounds of Contradiction

The approach here is to understand comparative racism within forms of contemporary capitalism and the logic in which it has lived and lives. Comparative racism attends to the production and reproduction of race, racialization, and racism as a global analytic with specific formations. Difficulties abound at the level of comparatism, not just because of how race is defined and historicized at different locations, but because of the complex formations of knowledge implied, crisscrossed by modes of epistemic violence contrasted with community agency unassimilable to standard cognitive "maps" of globality. In understanding the relationship of these processes within capitalism, I am influenced by Cedric Robinson, and particularly his book Black Marxism (1983/2000). This work has been rediscovered in recent years, although some critics betray an awkwardness with the second term in sharp contrast to a fluency with the first. The difference in reception is not just a measure of historical change between the publication of the work and now (particularly regarding the place of the collapse of actually-existing socialism and in the consolidation of neoliberalism), but is to some extent symptomatic of the thrust of Robinson's critique and displacement of Marxism from within in its own history. As he puts it, "The Black radical tradition cast[s] doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life, and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture" (170). This is not just a point in favor of culturalism against economism but is more forcefully a recognition of the vexed meaning of Black consciousness as a whole in understanding capital as a relation. A central concept in Black Marxism is racial capitalism and, while this can be a term that is invoked without having been read, it is a vital provocation about the necessity of comparatism in the articulation of anti-racism and anti-capitalism. Robinson, in a detailed and heavily-referenced analysis, shows how capitalism, rather than being a break from the racialist hierarchies deployed within feudalism, integrates its racist modes of differentiation as an accumulation practice. The slavery of colonialism is not incidental to capital accumulation but is a vital cog in trade and profit. Robinson not only critiques normative histories of capitalist development or evolution (including those within Marxism) but simultaneously provides a methodological riposte to the metaphysical proclivities in reading capital. True, arguments about the co-constituency of slavery and capitalism are not new (Eric Williams published his tome on the subject in 1944) but the point is Robinson is able to integrate the historical genealogy with a body of Black thinking around racism and capitalism (particularly from Du Bois, James, and Wright). Racial capitalism is a powerful heuristic, one that not only sheds light on the persistence of supremacist phantasmagoria in white identity, but also calls into question the introjection of racialist hierarchization in bourgeoisies of color. The challenge of comparative studies of race and racism from this perspective is the distillation of its contradictions, and what follows will stress the importance of these for materialist critique.

Within postcolonial materialism, the imbrication of race and capitalism is not novel to the extent that race, racial differentiation, and racism have been read to co-constitute colonialism as an economic and social structure of subjugation. Cedric Robinson's trenchant analysis of the Black Radical Tradition in Black Marxism clearly delineates how categories of race give to value extraction and exploitation a "rational" basis for such processes. It is not possible here to summarize the breadth and depth of emerging scholarship that builds on the insights of the Black Radical Tradition in this regard, but I do wish to consider what is extant of the concept in interdisciplinary studies as a set of challenges for comparative critique in particular. As Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy note in their introduction to the edited collection, Histories of Racial Capitalism, the primary focus of such research, whether in the disciplines of law, history, sociology, and Black Studies, has tended to be American-centered or Atlanticist in certain declensions. They ask: "How well does the...