We Are The World. Racial Capitalism and Its Links with Pan Africanism

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...

Racial capitalism and firearm violence: Developing a theoretical framework for firearm violence research examining structural racism

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 article analyses ‘racial capitalism’ as a cohesive but at times contradictory project. Understanding that both capitalism and White supremacy are constantly evolving, the objective here is to understand the political and economic currents that produce shifts in the composition and structure of institutional dispossession. To do this, I look at the abolition of slavery, the legislative victories of the civil rights movement and the current realignment of corporate classes in support of police and criminal justice reform as moments of structural change in the narrative history of ‘racial progress’ in the United States. The shifts and currents which undergird these structural changes typically occur when White supremacy challenges the integrity of capitalism and the corporate class. Expanding on existing literature that posits Whiteness as a ‘wage’, I argue that White identity functions as an asset with some level of liquidity – that is to say, it can be readily converted and exchanged. By understanding these underlying shifts and the ways in which corporate classes may seek to liquidate Whiteness, I argue, radical activists can better anticipate coming iterations of White supremacy and class exploitation.

The study of race and racism in the digital society must produce theoretically distinct and robust formulations of Internet technologies as key characteristics of the political economy. The author puts forth racial capitalism as a coherent framework for this research agenda. The argument for racial capitalism draws on two examples of its engagement with two characteristics of the digital society: obfuscation as privatization and exclusion by inclusion. Internet technologies are now a totalizing sociopolitical regime and should be central to the study of race and racism.

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

Background/Context Student loans reflect a larger shift in U.S. society in which people are forced to go into debt for basic needs. Student loan debt in the United States has been recognized as a political economic crisis that disproportionately devastates Black people. Scholars have statistically reported on racialized and gendered stratification in student loan outcomes and several name the racial wealth gap as the main contributing factor to the Black student debt crisis. Yet minimal attention has been dedicated to examining, let alone theorizing, the logics and systemic forces that racialize debt in higher education. Purpose Drawing on a theory of racial capitalism, this article fills analytic and theoretical gaps in the study of the Black student debt crisis by detailing how the crisis has been arranged as well as how it functions to constrain, dispossess, and exploit Black people. Research Design This article offers a corrective history, systematic analysis, and theoretical explanation of the Black student debt crisis. Findings/Results The paper draws on racial capitalism to account for how student loans as a policy has relied on anti-Black racial logics and systemic forces. The authors address how Black educational desires are co-opted, the government configures inclusion according to predatory terms, and the student loan industry forms a debt trap that exploits repayment struggles. While the majority of Black people who enroll in higher education never secure the promise of college as always “worth it,” the arrangement continues to be worthwhile for student loan profiteers. Student loans are perfect for racial capitalism because they answer demands for social access and inclusion (which are already reduced to mean credentialism) and reproduce both the disposability and dispossession of Black people's everyday lives. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors call for the full cancellation of student loan debt. This call forms part of a larger mobilization to abolish the racist logics, processes, and policies that make the Black student debt crisis and Black precarity possible in the first place.

ABSTRACTRacial capitalism has received much attention within the social sciences over the past few decades, including fields such as urban geography and infrastructural studies. This state of the field identifies key contributions, highlights the latest developments, draws attention to limitations, and points to future directions. Given the concept's multiple iterations and lineages beyond Cedric Robinson's framework, there is a risk racial capitalism might become an empty signifier if more work is not done by scholars to define their points of departure, clarify the concept's theoretical reach, and expand empirical contributions beyond the U.S. heartland. To advance the racial capitalism body of work, current scholarship suggests theoretical conversations with postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, Indigenous studies, and feminist approaches. There is also a need to engage not only with other variants of racial capitalism, but also with earlier scholarship that investigates the interplay between race/racialization and space.

This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.

Charting a path forward toward integrating macrolevel phenomena, marginalization, and health equity principles in into dissemination and implementation science.

The papers in this special issue engage Black radical intellectual ideas to highlight the related concepts of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. As such, these works challenge white supremacy in scholarship and beyond by providing case studies, interviews, essays, and theoretical explorations that center Black liberational thought and radical Black knowledge-making. Underpinning these efforts, is a commitment to challenge anti-Blackness in management and organization studies. Anti-Blackness is an organized and stubborn form of racism that targets Black communities by removing or denying their full humanity. In our introduction, we discuss the relationship between anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, and suggest that these are critical concepts for scholars of management and organization to meaningfully engage with. Racial capitalism has rapidly emerged over the last 10 years as a significant analytic of race and its materiality as a socioeconomic formation. We write this introduction to offer deeper insights into this concept and how its foundational ideas can be applied to current debates in the organization of scholarship, public policy, and corporate activity. Specifically, the special issue highlights the role of context and positionality in the formation of capitalism and urges scholars and activists to pay greater attention to how our analysis of race and capitalism must retain a focus on specific mechanisms and arrangements that shape these relations.

Editors’ Introduction

A militant critique of ‘Europe’ as the civilisation of racialism singles out the work of Cedric J. Robinson from other critical scholarship on Europe. Even though his concept of ‘racial capitalism’ is increasingly cited, on the whole, Robinson’s works are largely unknown in European studies. Perhaps they are too threatening to Europe’s self-centred and self-embellishing narratives on racism, which would explain European studies scholars’ silent treatment of Robinson’s critique of ‘Europe’ as foundational to the West’s culture of racialism. Unlike the proponents of postcolonial and decolonial studies, Robinson does not challenge Eurocentrism from a non-European perspective, but rather from the erased history of European slavery as the material variant of Western civilisation. To this end, he dives deeply into European medieval and early medieval history with a series of interventions that aim to abolish the notion that European culture was universalist in its trajectory, rather than racialist ab initio. And from that understanding derives the imperative for the abolition of the Western racialist order of civilisation.

Theorizing diverse economies in the context of racial capitalism

Racism means many different things to different people. This chapter explores how racism has been conceptualized in different time periods and using different frameworks. It begins by deconstructing what is meant by race and the many misunderstandings and misuses of this construct, such as “scientific racism.” The theories of racism that are explored and critiqued are ethnicity theories, psychological theories, structural theories, Critical Race Theory, coloniality, Critical Realism and racial capitalism. There is also consideration of different variables that shape racism such as different levels, direct and indirect racism, intentional and unintentional racism, different sites where racism occurs, and the frequency and magnitude of racism. A model is presented—the spectrum of racism—that diagrams much of what is covered in the chapter. There are also exercises to help students to apply different conceptual frameworks, to consider the impact of colonialism on the student’s ethnic/racial group, and applying the spectrum of racism to the student’s own experiences.