Coming to terms with racial capitalism

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. By William J. Maxwell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 272 pages. $52.00 (cloth). $18.50 (paper). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. By Cedric J. Robinson, with a foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley. London: Zed Press, 1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. $24.95 (paper). UNTIL THE 1990S, SCHOLARS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED AN UNCOMPLICATED narrative of black Marxist history. Conventional wisdom held that the relationship between communism and black struggle was inherently corrupt. Critics of African American cultural arts frequently portrayed the affiliation between "white communists" and black intellectuals as a kind of reenactment of the colonizer-colonized encounter, where black creative workers were expected to submit to a racist agenda. But, in 1989 Cary Nelson's inclusive Repression and Recovery suggested that in modernist period literary study such an account was fraught with difficulty. 1 Looking at the 1930s, Barbara Foley's chapter on "Race, Class, and the 'Negro Question'" in her Radical Representations a few years later challenged decades of received wisdom. 2 The genealogy of the reading, which assumes that blacks were expected to adopt an inferior status in communism, is traceable to historians and critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The views of such scholars exhibited a popular [End Page 367] separatist narrative that reflected the ideology of U.S. black cultural nationalism. 3 In recent years scholars of the Black Renaissance and Great Depression, early to mid-century radicalism and Marxism, black Atlantic studies, and whiteness studies have seen the publication of several valuable recovery projects. Along with Foley, James A. Miller, in Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon's Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, has challenged prevailing views of black-white radical affiliation. 4 George Hutchinson's monumental accomplishment The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, though not attentive to radical commitment, has also confronted predominant notions of the color line between the wars, contending that the portrayal of a division between blacks and whites working in the cultural arts is inconsistent with the material evidence. 5 Now two distinguished publications have arrived, one a persuasively sustained re-visioning of black and white Marxism in the U.S., the other a reprint of an invaluable study of black Marxist history and theory. William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars offers a vital reassessment of black American radicalism and proletarianism in the early decades of the twentieth century. And the University of North Carolina Press's reissue of Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition finally makes accessible this early 1980s vision of the origins of Marxist activism and black liberation struggle. Black Marxism is divided into three parts: the history of European capitalism and radicalism, the origins of black radicalism, and black radicalism's relationship to Marxism. The first section examines European socio-economic history, and its chief purpose is to analyze how "racial capitalism" developed. Now a familiar theoretical position, Robinson argues that the rise of industrial capitalism was built on a culture of racial construction. Emergent labor classes and ethnic minorities could be assembled through national identity formations--pitted against one another--to serve the dominant ideology. The Irish peasants' relocation to England during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, for example, occasioned the opportunity for "an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two 'races'": English and Irish (41). Thus "race" as a strategic mechanism for social control led to the immanence of "racialism" in Western civilization. Racialism ordered "the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of [End Page 368] these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences" (66). Radicalism then rose in Europe as a revolt against capitalism but also as a resistance to nationalism, racialism, and racial capitalism. Black Marxism's inquiry into the constructedness of...

In this paper, Matthew Cowley advances a theoretical approach toward higher education drawn from critical race theory (CRT) and Black Marxism. After an overview of CRT and Black Marxism, Cowley builds a working understanding of two recent (re)conceptualizations of race and class analysis that draw from both: (1) economies of racism and (2) critical raceclass theory of education. Subsequently, he connects two assumptions of CRT and Black Marxism — whiteness as property and racial capitalism — to expound on an original hypothesis, relate it to relevant issues in higher education, and evaluate it by deploying the economies of racism theoretical approach.

Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism and the uses of historical geography

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

The article is devoted to the views of Cedric Robinson on Marxism and the so-called "black Marxism". The author examines Robinson's criticism of the materialistic understanding of history from the point of view of a civilizational approach, reveals the meaning of the concept of "racial capitalism". He suggests how Marxism can fend off Robinson’s criticism and also talks about the possible fate of Marxism and its black radical criticism.

Elaborating on the techniques that the Black Studies scholar Cedric Robinson uses to write the histories of racial capitalism, this essay outlines a way to approach longue durée architectural histories. Robinson analyses racial capitalism in Black Marxism (1983) through the practices of what he calls the Black radical tradition, and these techniques provide a way to conceptualise a history of architecture in the modern Atlantic World that focuses on denaturalising the racial regimes that have shaped it. Using a series of examples—a lecture by a carpenter-architect in upstate New York, Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello, an advertisement for marble-quarrying labour in Tennessee, and the commodity chains of lumber—this essay outlines the questions and methods that Robinson’s approach, which he describes both as a “counterfeiting” of received discourse and as a non-dialectical negation of that discourse, suggests for architectural histories that attends to vast geographies and timescales.

Abstract: This introduction presents 'racial capitalism' as a timely and important avenue of study in contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Drawing inspiration from the belated French translation of Cedric Robinson's landmark Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition , it details early responses to Robinson's book on the francophone left, before engaging more broadly with the concept of racial capitalism in its more recent interpretations. Before detailing the issue's contributions, it argues that while work on race and racism in French and Francophone Studies is rich and expansive, work on racial capitalism remains to be developed.

This paper re‐examines the British workhouse within the framework of racial capitalism and the Atlantic world. Traditionally understood as a domestic mechanism for managing poverty and labour in an era of industrial capitalism, we argue the workhouse was deeply intertwined with global systems of racial exploitation and accumulation from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Tracing the workhouse's connections to Britain's colonial plantations, the transatlantic slave trade, and the circulation of finance, goods, ideas, and people in the Atlantic world, the paper challenges understandings of the workhouse's purely domestic function. Instead, the workhouse and plantation are understood as constitutively interlinked—forming a “workhouse–plantation nexus” which operated as a key component in shifting articulations of racial capitalism. Understanding this nexus reconfigures understandings of welfare histories that continue to shape racialised welfare systems and racial capitalism more broadly and is crucial for reparative justice.

In what ways does humanitarianism uphold racial capitalism? The article draws on and expands Cedric Robinson’s arguments about the relationship between humanitarianism and racial capitalism in his Black Marxism. It does so by focusing on the Mission to Seafarers in the countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The Mission has worked alongside state institutions and businesses, both before and after independence from Britain, to facilitate maritime trade through these Arabian ports. In the context of seafarer exploitation, these institutions – the extractive, the governing and the caring – need to ensure worker productivity to facilitate racial accumulation of capital. I argue that the Mission acts as part of the structure of political economic order to produce a racially striated, capitalist politics of care to individuated and atomised seafarers, acting to conciliate conflicts between seafarers and shipowners, maintain seafarer productivity and diminish the possibility of collective mobilisation.

Despite of the centrality of the topic of labour in the 1983 book by Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, global labour studies have devoted little attention to the concept of racial capitalism that became established with Robinson’s book. Robinson’s main claim is that the first proletariat formed in the plantations in colonized countries from about the 16th century, calling into question the crucial relevance of the industrial proletariat in England (and Europe) for the emergence of the labour movement. In taking up recent debates on racial capitalism that are inspired by Robinson´s work, but which also expand and criticize it, this text proposes a more integrated theorization of race and labour. It also takes up debates about the Plantationocene as a complex dispositive which connects ecological rupture, large scale production and racialised labour.

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of the Balkan and Greek postcolonial and de-colonial studies. The Yugoslav ethnic wars, the Greek “financial crisis,” and the European migration crisis generated a body of critical studies on regional nationalism, coloniality, and racialism and the Balkans and Greece's ambiguous relation to Europe. Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition was missing from the large spectrum of postcolonial literature. This absence is surprising given that the book historicizes the simultaneous occurrence of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and modernity in the Balkan and the East Mediterranean during the late feudalism. The absence of this history from the Balkan's post and de-colonial studies deprives these studies of an abolitionist perspective; rather than opting for “provincializing Europe” empowered by this history of the native enslavements and colonization, these studies, much as Black radicalism should mobilize the region for the political culture for the abolition of “Europe.”

Despite increasing institutionalised recognition of Indigenous and Black environmental concerns in governance processes, the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in North America continue to normalise dispossession and disproportionately burden marginalised communities with environmental harms. Engaging recent critiques of the inability of Indigenous rights frameworks to reverse ongoing colonial dispossessions and the failure of environmental justice policies to address racialised environmental inequalities, this article argues that political ecologists must contend with the limitations of institutionalisedrecognitionof historically marginalised communities in North American environmental governance. We argue that institutionalisation of such concern, while putatively redressing injustices or reconciling dispossession through environmental governance, functions more to elide historic drivers and geographic processes of marginalisation than to disrupt white supremacy and settler colonialism.

The history of colonialism in Canada has meant both the partition of Indigenous peoples from participating (physically, politically, legally) in the economy and a relentless demand to become assimilated as liberal capitalist citizens. Assimilation and segregation are both tendencies of colonization that protect the interests of white capital. But their respective prevalence seems to depend on the regime of racial capitalism at play. This paper examines the intersection of settler colonization and racial capitalism to shed light on the status of Indigenous economic rights in Canada. I ask, to what extent are Indigenous peoples understood to have economic rights—defined here as the governing authority to manage their lands and resources—and, how we can we analyze these rights to better understand the conjoined meanings of colonialism and capitalism as systems of power today? In this paper, I look at two sites to address this problem: first, I examine how the Supreme Court of Canada has defined the “Aboriginal right” to commercial economies since the patriation of Aboriginal rights into the Constitution in 1982; and, second, I examine how these rights are configured through state resource revenue-sharing schemes with First Nations, in particular from extractive projects, over the past few years. Each case study provides critical material for analyzing the economic opportunities available to First Nations through democratic channels of state “recognition,” as well as when and why tensions between state policies of segregation and assimilation emerge.

This article weighs the meaning, potential, and pitfalls of the concept of “racial capitalism” for studying the nexus of racial division and the economy. The concept has spread like wildfire in Anglophone social science since its≠ introduction in Cedric Robinson’s revisionist account of the rise of capitalism as racializing, but it remains epistemically inchoate and analytically problematic. The critique of leading uses and common corollaries of the term shows that it stipulates that which needs to be explicated, namely, the “articulation” of capitalism “through race,” which is not a structural invariant but ranges from coevalness and synergy to parasitism and disconnection. The notion cannot accommodate the varied bases of race as a naturalizing and hierarchizing principle of vision and division as well as the historical peculiarity of the economic variant of slavery in the Atlantic world. Advocates of “racial capitalism” need to put in the hard work of epistemological elucidation, logical clarification, and historical elaboration needed if they are to make the label more than a “conceptual speculative bubble.”

Beyond the green new deal? Dependency, racial capitalism and struggles for a radical ecological transition in Argentina and Latin America