Is the Homo in Homocapitalism the Caste in Caste Capitalism and the Racial in Racial Capitalism?

This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.

This essay examines how the operation of background rules and institutions provided by law leads to the expulsion of individuals under racial capitalism based upon gender. Aligning itself with anti-capitalist work by critical theorists of social reproduction and intersectionality, it contributes to perspectives on racial capitalism that regard gender, in the way it creates subjects and differentiates between workers, as a co-constituting force with race under racial capitalism. Women and transgender persons, because of gender, are precariously situated on the edge of exile from the economic order. It makes this argument by weaving feminist insights – particularly those articulated in scholarship on social reproduction and intersectionality – with perspectives on racial capitalism.

This article explores humanitarian-development responses to displacement as postcolonial modes of security within actually existing racial capitalism. Focusing on Greece's “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” program, it provides insight into “make-live” interventions that temporarily subsidize stranded migrants’ social reproduction at Europe's frontiers. The article argues that development-led refugee-hosting strategies, marketed as win–win solutions for both “hosted” and “hosting” communities, actually serve a twofold function: containing racially subordinate outsiders and compensating so-called transit countries for taking up the task of “keeping out by keeping alive.” By minimally supporting migrants’ social reproductive needs within designated territories, the racial biopolitics of the humanitarian-development nexus brings surplus populations into the fold of local capital accumulation while sustaining the global color line. Analyzing the refugee humanitarian-development nexus as a spatioracial fix that harnesses the vital capacities of surplus populations, the article seeks to: invite discussion on the social reproduction of populations violently cast out of the wage relation; theorize racial capitalism beyond metropolitan centers and their (post)colonial borderlands, highlighting the role of intermediary spaces as crucial nodes of georacial and capitalist stabilization; and demonstrate how the dialectic between humanitarianism and rentier economies embeds new racialized hierarchies between crisis-affected local “hosts” and surplused migrant “guests.”

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

This chapter explores the resurgence of interest in social reproduction in the social sciences and its stalled uptake in economic geography. Charting a brief history of analyses of the relationship between productive and reproductive labour, I argue that feminist economic geographers have long called for a future research agenda for economic geography that takes seriously the domains of reproduction and care as ‘properly economic’. That reproductive labour is racialized, as well as gendered and classed, signals the imperative for feminists to take seriously the imbrication of social reproduction and racial capitalism in relation to both research and praxis.

In this paper, I analyze how an organization, Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), was formed to challenge the increasingly militarized racialized police force in Los Angeles during neoliberal industrial reorganization, regional abandonment, and massive prison boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Studying CAPA allows for an analysis of the radical ideas and actions that came out of on-the-ground mobilization by the very communities being criminalized and policed. By applying a framework combining social reproduction, racial capitalism, and police geographies, I argue that analyzing CAPA provides critical insight into how the police and police violence are integral to reproducing and securing racialized spaces, capitalist power relations, and expanded accumulation. Through CAPA, I demonstrate how a grassroots formation developed an analysis around policing and capitalism. This analysis informed their antipolicing infrastructure centered around social reproduction to raise counterhegemony and advance a broader challenge against ongoing state violence and the social relations of production, which they saw as upholding race-classed oppression. Doing so demonstrates a prefigurative politics which can inform the current moment of challenging policing, whereby struggles around social reproduction challenge the everyday conditions of existence and provide leverage for building consciousness around and contesting sociospatial relations to transform society.

The Quito River in northwestern Colombia, home to Black Communities’ collective territories, faces severe degradation due to alluvial gold mining. For decades, migrant laborers using large dredgers entered into agreements with local Afro-Chocoan families and community councils in riverside towns to extract gold. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, this article examines how these arrangements devastated subsistence croplands, modernized local homes, and intensified residents’ reliance on cash. Applying Marxist feminist perspectives on the indirect exploitation of reproductive labor, the article highlights the link between global capital accumulation and the structural oppression of Black populations. I argue that the mechanization of alluvial gold mining involves land, labor, and credit arrangements that couple labor subsumption with social reproductive crises, recursively depriving Black riverside communities of the limited gains from extraction. Through my interlocutors’ life stories, I demonstrate that percentage-based gold compensation and cash payments function as variable capital, which disciplines riverside communities and allows gold traders to appropriate the unpaid reproductive work of Black women. The study contributes to the literature on racial capitalism and social reproduction by revealing the hidden sources of surplus labor exploited and appropriated through the mechanization of alluvial gold extraction and the devaluation of Afro-diasporic lands.

A conexão entre os estudos sobre reprodução social e capitalismo racial mostra que a história global da escravidão atlântica é uma história de gênero; e a história de gênero da escravidão atlântica é uma história global. Abordar particularmente o trabalho reprodutivo, em todas as suas formas, e a centralidade das relações de gênero na transmissão de propriedade e status possibilita uma maior compreensão da escravidão atlântica como um aspecto extremamente importante da história global moderna. De fato, sem atentar às relações de gênero e especificamente ao trabalho reprodutivo, a história global da escravidão atlântica será inevitavel mente parcial e incompleta. O trabalho reprodutivo das mulheres na África, assim como nas Américas, deve ser entendido como parte integrante do desenvolvimento da escravidão atlântica e, portanto, do capitalismo racial.

The existential threat posed by anthropogenic climate change is a powerful indictment of contemporary capitalism. It requires us to directly confront modern capitalism as a civilizing project that renders irrational and obsolete other possibilities of organizing economic and social life. Adopting a decolonial perspective that incorporates theories of racial capitalism, coloniality, and social reproduction, we examine how racial/colonial capitalism articulates the labourenvironment nexus in ways that facilitate or undermine different sorts of livelihoods and socioecologies. We then reflect on how the differentiation and hierarchization that flow from exploitation (labour) and expropriation (labour and land) are reproduced in labour law’s epistemology, evidencing its coloniality. We conclude with a call to embrace epistemic pluralism as crucial to developing labour law that reflects and facilitates heterogeneous livelihoods and ecopolitical justice. Coloniality, Racial Capitalism, Labour and Land, Socio-Ecology, Environment, Social Reproduction, Decolonial Thinking, Dissident Epistemology, Legal Pluralism

Scholars cite racist political-economic systems as drivers of health inequities in the United States (i.e., racial capitalism). But how does racial capitalism generate health inequities? I address this open question within the historical context of predatory lending during the 2008 financial crisis. Relevant hypotheses are tested with multiple waves of data from Black and White participants of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N = 8,877). Across socioeconomic strata, I find that Black participants report higher rates of foreclosure, eviction, repossession, delinquent bills, lost income, and new debts in the wake of the financial crisis. Using structural equation and quasi-experimental models, I then show that Black participants also self-report rapid health declines and increases in prescription drug abuse throughout this period, much of which is explained by chronic financial stress. I conclude that racial capitalism can generate health inequities by ensnaring Black Americans in a toxic web of financial exploitation and stress proliferation.

This article employs the theoretical concept of racial capitalism as an intellectual framework with which to theorise and explain racialised inequality in South Africa. Historical evidence shows that the accumulation of Whiteness in South Africa has historically been inseparable from the accumulation of capital. This work illustrates that the African National Congress (ANC) used the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to launder and legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. It identifies Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as one of the ANC government’s economic laundering schemes that it employs to legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. I use the insight of scholars such as Marzia Milazzo to conclude that, as a full-blown laundered discourse, racial capitalism allows a White middle class to continue to own and manage the means of production and intergenerational wealth, while a Black middle class continues to endure intergenerational poverty and dispossession.

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

Bringing into connection the scholarship on social reproduction and racial capitalism shows that the global history of Atlantic slavery is a gendered story; and the gendered history of Atlantic slavery is a global story. Attending in particular to reproductive labor in all its forms, and to the centrality of gender relations to the transmission of property and status, enables greater understanding of Atlantic slavery as a critically important aspect of modern global history. Indeed, without attention to gender and specifically to reproductive work, the global history of Atlantic slavery will inevitably be partial and incomplete. The reproductive work of women in Africa, as well as in the Americas, should be understood as an integral part of the development of Atlantic slavery, and thus of racial capitalism.

This chapter tells the story of an imaginary map of racial capitalism. The image functions as both mystery and diagram, leading the viewer to trace possible routes of culpability and connection but also illustrating unexpected relations of supplementarity. In a previous imperial era, the pictorial depiction of Britannia sought to visualize a set of global connections with Britannia herself at centre, in a relation of benevolence and/or domination to the massed others of the world. This story and image reflects on this earlier genre of visualizing a particular moment in the history of racial capitalism. In particular, the image raises the following questions: who or what centres systems of racial capitalism today? What does the ‘periphery’ look like in our time? How can we conceptualize the supplementary role of social reproduction and imagine social reproduction beyond the household? What clues can we uncover to trace the spatial pathways inhabited by racial capitalism? What, still now, lives in the shadows and what practices of imagination can help us to touch those spaces?