Racial Capitalism and Subaltern Struggles in Neo-Apartheid Sweden

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon’s work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and working-class communities of color in particular often serve to reproduce inequality across generations. It is common, however, for critical scholars analyzing educational inequality to be steeped in either Marxism or critical race theory, and less knowledgeable about the other. As a result, analyses rarely place equal emphasis on both theoretical frames or synthesize race and class. Using theories of racial capitalism to extend Anyon’s political economic analysis, we contend, brings forward conceptual tools and angles that capture the material and ideological work being done by current, highly racialized neoliberal restructuring in and beyond the school walls. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We focus on the ways race operates as a material force that is part and parcel of the capitalist dynamics that create and require inequality, and argue that racial violence structures capitalist development, making the systematic impoverishment of urban schools and neighborhoods possible and permissible. First, we provide an overview of two key theories of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed. We then revisit Anyon’s work on school knowledge and the hidden curriculum to consider how these operate as forms of epistemic and psychic racial violence that (re)produce racial capitalist conditions. Next, we consider Anyon’s work on political economy and public policy in light of the ways neoliberal racial capitalism links the production of differential human value to capitalist development in urban neighborhoods, deploying public policies that limit the life chances of working class and poor youth of color. Finally, we consider the implications of these dynamics for the “radical possibilities” that inhere in urban schools, arguing that opposition to racial capitalism stretches Anyon’s formulation of the “radical” and the “possible,” as youth oppose racial capitalism by resisting the school itself. Research Design: In this theoretical article, we use theories of racial capitalism to analyze Anyon’s major works in urban education. Putting core concepts from these theories into conversation with Anyon’s findings and her own theorizations, we offer an analytical synthesis that braids together race and class to unpack the production of urban educational inequality. Conclusions/Recommendations: We propose that reading racial capitalism into Anyon’s work can extend her political economic analysis, and through such extension, her findings, analyses, and arguments can be leveraged to help us better understand how race and racism interlock with the ideologies, social structures, and chaos of capitalist development and neoliberal reform. We contend that such an analysis can build out both the “radical” and the “possible” with implications for how we think about opposition and organizing not just within but against schools.

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.

Homeownership has long been considered the cornerstone of the American dream, and considerable research has pointed to the social benefits of homeownership for both families and communities. Yet research concerning this link between homeownership and social participation has recently undergone critique for failing to consider neighborhood context. Do homeowners in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods become active participants in neighborhood improvement, or do they feel stuck in undesirable neighborhoods where they perceive little potential for change? The research addresses endogeneity concerns and shows that, when compared with renters, homeowners are more likely to have voted in recent local elections. Neighborhood context does moderate this relationship, with homeowners in disadvantaged neighborhoods being more likely to vote than owners in other areas. These findings suggest that, despite potential household-level costs associated with owning a home in a disadvantaged urban area, responsible homeownership in such areas promotes local political involvement among lower income residents.

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

Recent years have witnessed increased academic interest in the relations between poverty, environment and place. Studies of poverty in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods have pointed to the contribution of despoiled local environments to social exclusion. Work in urban political ecology has highlighted the socio-environmental hybridity of injustices in the city, bringing a political dimension to debates on urban sustainability, while research on environmental justice has directed critical attention towards the local and everyday (urban) contexts of socio-ecological forms of injustice. This paper explores the everyday spaces and mundane forms of (in)justice through a case study of community gardening in cities. Drawing on materials derived from a recent study of 18 community gardening projects in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods in the UK, this paper highlights how these projects are using ordinary forms of environmentalism to produce new socio-ecological spaces of justice within the city.

Reflexion theorique sur Achimota, symbole du transfert pedagogique effectue entre les Etats-Unis, l'education industrielle des africains americains et le continent africain. Les auteurs reflechissent a la raison de ce transfert et aussi au mode d'implementation et de realisation du transfert en fonction des contextes economiques, geographiques et historiques.

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation.

Reviewed by: Reimagining Social Medicine from the South by Abigail H. Neely Kwaku Nti Neely, Abigail H. Reimagining Social Medicine from the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Foregrounded in social medicine (a branch in the medical field that focuses on demographic determinants of health and the biology of disease, as well as community-oriented primary care [COPC] that influenced the World Health Organization [WHO]–led primary health care for all), this book upholds the Pholela Community Health Center (PCHC) "unbecoming role." Significantly, yet, the author derives her ideas from the experiences of the proximate community—that is "the homes, landscapes, and lives—the worlds of Pholela residents" (xv). Abigail Neely, essentially, reiterates that it is conceptually impracticable to fully comprehend the global story of social medicine without the lives of the residents of Pholela, their homesteads, health, and words, since these elements proffer the possibilities and limitations of this field, and equally pushes for a more-than-human understanding of social life in illness and wellness. Arguably, in the cast of Charles van Onselen, who did a social history of the industrialized gold mining sector of the economy of South Africa and shifted the glorious attention from the mine owners to the underground miners and others in that category, Neely de-emphasizes "laudatory narratives of white male doctors who practice medicine to fight for social justice" (4) and centers Pholela residents as the people who lived in the community and made different worlds amid the vagaries of illness and wellness. She, therefore, juxtaposes the sacrosanct scientific study of PCHC with the understandings and interventions borne out of the worlds in which the Pholela people lived. Neely avers, and justifiably so, that these local and cultural understandings and interventions forged "health outcomes in ways social medicine could not always understand and treat" because "for all its many successes, the PCHC was haunted by its own faith in [End Page 220] science, both biomedical and social, as well as by broader political and economic forces at work in South Africa" (4). Elaborating on the limitations of the PCHC program, Neely discusses its inability to consider the role of the people in the development of the practice, disregard of the sociality of nonhuman things that remain integral to it, and the lack of understanding of Pholela-specific social relationships giving a deep "vision of social life in which individual actors disappear and health and illness emerge as the product of entanglements" (5). Connected to the foregoing factor is the idea of "ontological coordination"; for the residents of Pholela, "ontologies are multiple, relational, and overlapping" (4), a kind of multiplicity that reveals yet another limitation to the social medicine practiced in the Pholela vicinity. Finally, the political ecology inflected by the scholarship on racial capitalism also illuminates some of the limits of social medicine practiced in Pholela. Although the health center could assist with modifications of the homesteads of the residents in addition to offering clinical care, it hardly could change the overarching structures of racial capitalism that heavily impacted livelihoods, illness, and wellness. Neely points out that to the extent that the political economy of South Africa was stratified by race, scholarship on racial capitalism is particularly valuable for a political-ecology analysis in Pholela. According to these scholars, capitalism, as well as capital accumulation, predicated a racial hierarchy that both government policy and industrial practices reinforced. The policies and practices culminated in Apartheid ensuring astronomical profit for whites at the expense of the well-being of African laborers. Reimagining Social Medicine from the South essentially consists of four chapters that are bookended by the introduction and conclusion. In chapter 1, Neely discusses her sources that mainly include archival documents, PCHC publications, and regional ethnographies of the Nguni people. While not discounting the biases and problems of these various sources, she affirms that in varying degrees, they are helpful for understanding the vision of social medicine that the PCHC practiced. She uses these sources to tell the story of the beginnings and operations of the PCHC and concludes that "seeing like a health center meant making certain aspects of health center practice visible to the outside world, all while recognizing how...

In 2011 milk banks became key components of the public health establishment in South Africa, when the country committed to promoting exclusive breastfeeding to fight infant morbidity and mortality. In this article I present a conjunctural analysis of how donor human milk banks are social reproductive infrastructures that facilitate the flow of milk at a space-time of racial capitalist infectious disease and neoliberal care crises. I ask: How do multiscalar governing logics, discourses, and technologies articulate to make this donor economy a conjunctural form of distributed social and biological reproduction? How have various interlocking economic, ecological, and reproductive crises underpinned the emergence of milk banking infrastructures? And, methodologically, how can conjunctural analysis fold in necessary attention to the embodied, biological, biomedical, and religious factors that shape social reproductive politics in a given space-time? I argue that this social reproductive infrastructure is molded through the articulation of numerous discourses and processual logics that dialectically entwine the global and local, including socioecological and embodied crisis, biomedicalization, networks of kin and care, and secularization. In so doing I build out a conjunctural analytic attentive to social reproduction under racial capitalism that privileges the body, ecologies, kinship, and religious-cultural norms.

This article analyzes two planned cities—Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and Bloemfontein (South Africa)—to investigate connectivities across geographies and temporalities and reveal the role of urban planning in racial capitalism. Early works in urban sociology underscore the color line in producing differentiation in capitalist development. But color-blind analyses of capitalism have undermined the role of race in the urbanization process and formation of value—of places and people—and how the modern triad—colonial, racial, and capital—is deeply implicated in power modalities. Based on policy analysis, we historicize political choices discussing urban planning and national developmentalist schemes after redemocratization that produced racial-spatial inequalities. We argue that color-blind urban policies still neglect the role of race in the production of Brazilian and South African cities under the guise of “planning innocence.” This discussion expands our understanding of urbanization and capital accumulation as a dialectical process of Black dispossession and the protection of White property in the postcolony.

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.

From its beginnings, the sociology of work in South Africa has been preoccupied with three enduring themes: skill/deskilling, racism in the workplace, and Fordism/racial Fordism. With the advent of democracy in the 1990s there was a shift away from studying the labour process. We argue in this article that there has been a return to taking seriously the ways new forms of work in this postcolonial context pose new questions to the global study of work. A central preoccupation in the study of work has been the racialised reinscription of post-apartheid workplace orders, now in the context of new dynamics of externalisation and casualisation of employment. Another important theme is the shift away from studies of the formal sector workplace and toward the broader implications of the precarianisation and informalisation of labour. This focus coincided with the growth of new social movements by mostly unemployed (black) township residents around state services provision. This includes studies on working-class politics more broadly, with attention focusing on questions of organising and mobilising. More recently this interest in precarious labour has grown into studies of the gig economy, returning to earlier themes of technology and skill, as well as new forms of waged labour and wagelessness. We argue for the ongoing salience of labour process studies for understanding the specific issues of the securing and obscuring of value, and through the articulations of ‘racial capitalism’ offered by the long tradition of labour studies in South Africa.

Anne Power. CITY SURVIVORS: BRINGING UP CHILDREN IN DISADVANTAGED NEIGHBOURHOODS. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2007. Ppbk: £17.59; Hdbk: £59.Neighbourhoods shape people's lives, providing essential services that families and children depend on. This involves the physical space that shapes the early life experience of the young, where children can socialize outside of the family and acquire the coping skills necessary for adulthood. Anne Power's book, City Survivors, provides a unique perspective on how neighbourhoods condition the life experience of families and children in four highly disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England: two in east London and two in urban areas in Northern England. Drawing from rich ethnographic data collected over a period of 5 years, a large part of this book is told through the words of 24 interviewees, mostly mothers, who are raising their children alone and in poverty. The end product is a highly readable book, following a narrative style, of relevance to academics, students and potentially many other interested readers.Told through the stories of parents, this book allows the reader to empathize with mothers who raise children in neighbourhoods that all too frequently create fear and unease among residents and their children. As impUed in the title of this book, many of these families are barely surviving in neighbourhoods noted for their chronic unemployment, crime, poor housing, pollution, traffic congestion, lack of amenities for children and adolescents, and inadequate health and education services. As part of a larger longitudinal study that involves visits to over 200 families, from 1998 to 2004, Power continues with her ongoing interest in urban regeneration, and how such disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods can be improved without displacing the low-income families that Uve in them. A principle contribution of this text, as implied in the stories of residents, is that a particularly undervalued asset of these neighbourhoods is the social capital that in large measure is created by families with children.While disadvantaged neighbourhoods have many problems associated with poverty, the residents and families of these areas are not to be demonized. As the city survivors indicate through their own personal testimonies (over half of the book directly draws from Power's field notes), famines need each other, rely upon social spaces, supervise each other's children and attempt to provide a reasonable quality of Ufe for all concerned. In so doing, parents create social contact within urban neighbourhoods and with other parents, family members and neighbours. This in turn fosters the necessary goodwill towards neighbours that serves to build community, even under difficult urban conditions. …

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism’s center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.

This article explores how to make sense of the feeling of unfreedom in South Africa today and how this unfreedom, charged with local and historical legacies, can be connected to global capitalist dynamics. Paralleling excerpts of the oral histories of Khumo who moved to Johannesburg in 1976, and Kagiso, who moved in 2015, this piece discusses how dispossession characterises unfreedom. Bringing literature on racial capitalism back to South Africa, its place of origin, and grounding it in the narratives of Khumo and Kagiso, the piece discusses the history and development of global dynamics of spatial exclusion and subjective, material, and productive-creative alienation. Furthermore, it discusses how Khumo and Kagiso perceive dispossession as historical thus racialised and manufactured, and contest it by negating racialisation and the idea of freedom. The article thus contributes to wider debates about neoliberalism in Africa, and (global) racial capitalism, showing how dispossession remains the main expression of unfreedom under capitalism; and how unfree life is reproduced every day in and through cities, and is lived as alienation.