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Essay: The idea of a ‘racial capitalism’

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  • Subject area(s): Sociology essays
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  • Published: 9 March 2022*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
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  • Words: 1,572 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 7 (approx)
  • Tags: Essays on racism

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In recent years, the idea of a ‘racial capitalism’ has become increasingly proliferated amongst scholars and activists, especially in light of a number of instances of police brutality against unarmed African-Americans. Left-wing activists believe beyond reasonable doubt that capitalism and racism are inextricably linked, with the main concern being why this isn’t a more widespread view. Where clarification is still needed is in the particularities of this link, as Kundnani (2020) stated “We are still in the process of deciding what we mean by it”, with books by scholars such as Gargi Bhattacharyya’s Rethinking Racial Capitalism (2018) each having their own intricate interpretation of the mechanisms of the connection between racism and capitalism. I will argue that it is not possible to understand capitalism outside of the study of race and racism, focusing on why (1) sociological thought has occluded race in discussions around modernism historically; (2) how racial capitalism works and (3) how race is central to the resistance against the oppressive forces of capitalism, most noticeably in the form of ‘black radicalism’. Firstly, it is important to focus on why the idea of a ‘racial capitalism’ hasn’t been more prevalent in western sociological thought.

Sociology has historically been framed by sociologists as ‘the angel of history’ aiming to ‘salvage the promise of progress (Buraway, 2005, p.260). However, despite this idealistic view, Virdee (2019, p.4) has illustrated how sociology has a history of obfuscating knowledge about issues surrounding race, mainly due to the fact that many of the founding fathers of sociology in the west were social darwinists, such as William Sumner, Lester Ward and Edward Ross in the USA. For instance, in British sociology where there has been a sophisticated tradition of deep scholarship on class, there has been an ignorance and reluctance to explore the relations between race and class despite the work generated by scholars in racism studies who have generated debates about the marriage between racism and capital (Bhattacharya, 2015; Hall, 1980). Bhambra (2014) has stated this divided in British sociological thought is so overt, that she states there is a separation between ‘two traditions’ in sociology – one black, the other white. This divided is most pronounced in the study of the relationship between race and capitalism. Bhambra has debunked the conventional beliefs about ‘the European ownership of modernity’ illustrating both the multiplicitous roots of the Renaissance period and has opened intriguing lines of enquiry about the importance of the enslavement and dispossession of humans from ‘the world beyond Europe’ in ‘contributing to the commercial growth that stimulated the development of the West’ (Bhambra, 2007, p.137). Marx’s primary contributions to sociological thought is to depict the fact that ‘what makes modernity modern is, first and foremost capitalism itself’ (Sayer, 1991, p.12). Therefore, what Bhambra posits, leads us to the scholarship surrounding the intricacies of the relationship between racism and capitalism, an area mainly labelled racial capitalism.

The first usage of racial capitalism is believed to be first used in a pamphlet by the anti-apartheid movement in London (Kundnani, 2020). The idea was initially developed by South African Marxists who were trying to come to an understanding of the Apartheid system in their home. They held a different set of beliefs to the African National Congress (ANC) who didn’t believe that there was any connection between capitalism and apartheid. Instead of this, the South African Marxists posited that racism and been essential for the development of South African capitalism (Olende, 2021). Cedric Robinson, a Black Marxist scholar, was in the Uk during this time and was heavily influenced by the theorisations of the the South Africans. Robinson extrapolated it to capitalism as a whole, positing that capitalism has been inseparably linked to ideas of race and racism throughout its history. Wealth accumulation under the order of capitalism was driven by colonialism and transatlantic slavery, therefore a capitalism without racism is an impossibility, which is due to the fact that ‘racial regimes are constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power” (Robinson, 2012, p.12). Robinsons cites two primary causes for the co-development of racism and capitalism. Firstly, he cites that Europe was the birthplace of capitalism, where ideas of racialisation and the division of the population along racial lines that were unprecedented in other parts of the world. This is depicted by that fact that he states “the bourgeoisie…were drawn from particular ethnic and cultural group” and that “the tendency of European civilisation through capitalism was thus not to homogenise but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into “racial” ones” (Robinson, 2000, p.25). Secondly, the idea that prior to industrial capitalism there was mercantile capitalism which was primarily constructed on the back of transatlantic slave trade, therefore on the back of racial oppression and the capital exploitation of Black people as bi-products (Olende, 2021).

This thesis on racial capitalism by Cedric Robinson was an extension of work done by Oliver Cromwell Cox who wrote Caste, Class and Race (1948). The main argument of Cox was that race and class were historically bound together, and stated that capitalism was a global expansionist project. This is substantiated by a view posited by Karl Marx who stated that the multiplicitous and abundant nature of capitals gave the emergent system of capitalism a dynamism and ability for continuous growth (Sayer, 1991, p.29). This results in these variously accumulated capitals breaking free from the boundaries of their European states out into the world and in search of more raw material and property, therefore the capitalists who were the executors of the system, were required to police and rationalise the exploitation of workers (Cox, 1948). Initially, Cox argued that racism was a byproduct of chattel slavery, rather than the trade in African slaves developing and growing as a result of racism. Going so far as stating that “if white workers were available in sufficient numbers, they would have been substituted” (Cox, 1970, p.332). However, as Cox continued to expand his theory on racism as being a systemic formation, he divorced himself from the previously heavily Marx-influenced position, critiquing it as being too “rigid…concerning the role of industrial workers in modern revolutionary movements” (Cox, 1964, p.218). Instead of this overly deterministic position which only applied to industrial capitalism but not the earlier mercantile capitalism, Cox posited that racism therefore must have predated the emergence of capitalism, and was simply taken up and accelerated to an extremely nefarious level in the construction of the ‘Negro’ subject, or non-subject. The main contradiction at the centre of industrial capitalism is the fact that the human was reconciled as atomised individuals who interacted with each other through contractual agreements. However, due to the demands of capitalism, this was not a right that was given to enslaved African people, which required a justification by the slaveholders. Robinson (2000, p.100) explains this dynamic by stating:

For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object.

This creates a link between the creation of the ‘Negro’ as inferior to their counterparts of European descent to the spread of slavery, which was the extension of capitalism that dealt with trade of enslaved African subjects, thus highlighting why I believe that it is not possible to understand capitalism without the study of race and racism. Robinson even refers to the fact that Marx referred to slavery as ”the chief moment of primitive accumulation”, highlighting how it was justified by the creation of the racial mythology of white supremacy, so that the black (non)-subject would be categorised as an object, further illustrating the inextricable link between the creation of the most malevolent form of racism and the early acceleration of capitalism, hence racism capitalism.

I’ve set out how race is linked to the origins of capitalism, hence why they can only be understood in conjunction with one another, but they are also linked by the fact that race plays a significant part in the resistance against capitalism. C.L.R James’ Black Jacobins (1938) about the Haitian revolution in the late 18th century and W.E.B Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) about the part African-Americans played in the American civil war and the aftermath, were two major influences on Cedric Robinson’s ideas surrounding Black radicalism. Robinson (2000, p.309) believed this to be a social organisation that was deeply rooted in a black consciousness as:

It was not…an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans… Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively recreate a precedent metaphysic… This was the raw material of the black radical tradition…constructed from a shared philosophy developed in the African past and transmitted as culture, from which revolutionary consciousness was realised and the ideology of struggle formed.

Robinson is claiming here that the social organisations that were formed in response the oppressive forces of racial capitalism, what Harris (2018) refers to as the ‘aesthetic sociality of Blackness’ was rooted in a traditional and culturally retained non-hierarchical African worldview that was in contrast to the rigidity of both the western cultural and intellectual tradition, stating that the different lied in :

the capacity of human beings to hold together their social structures without the authority of rulers or the presence of political leaders” (Robinson, 2016, p.185).

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