[Out of a common history emerged racism, capitalism, and the whole
world. This offers us a clue on how to change that world.]
[[link removed]]

A FRAMEWORK TO HELP US UNDERSTAND THE WORLD  
[[link removed]]


 

Olúf ́mi O. Táíwò
March 10, 2023
Hammer and Hope [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Out of a common history emerged racism, capitalism, and the whole
world. This offers us a clue on how to change that world. _

“The Weight of Scars,” 2015, Otobong Nkanga

 

_Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the
problem of religion and democracy, of humanity. … The emancipation
of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is
the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown
and Black. — W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Reconstruction in America,”
1935_

When the British Crown assumed direct rule over Kenya in 1895, that
year marked a milestone in a project to restructure the social world
to aggrandize a few well-placed elites in London. The British Crown
had pursued this same project in Jamestown, where it created the
colonies that would become the United States; in Bengal, where the
British East India Company’s armed forces established a political
foothold on the Indian subcontinent; and in countless far-off places.
Racial capitalism is a framework to understand what the British Crown
sought to build.

But what is racial capitalism, anyway, and where does the term come
from? For some people, racial capitalism is one word too many:
“Capitalism” alone explains the kinds of oppression and
exploitation we see in the world. For others, “racial capitalism”
is several words too few: The phrase fails to mention gender, ability,
nationality, and other bases for systematic injustice. But racial
capitalism is best understood as a way that both racism and capitalism
work in history and in the present — and how the world as a whole is
formed from the areas of colonialism built off the trans-Atlantic
slave trade.

Consider a closer look at the historical example of colonial Kenya,
where the British Crown — an empire, not a corporation — embarked
on a massive redistribution of economic and political power. The
categories for these redistributions were racial. The colonial
government expropriated
[[link removed]] the most
agriculturally productive land and relegated the African
“natives,” including the Maasai, Kikuyu, and Kalenjin who had
lived and worked on these very lands, to “reserves.” The colonial
government gave exorbitantly large estates to white settlers and
restricted Indian settlement to low-lying lands.

By 1951, the result was a standard assignment of teams: wealthy
capitalists at the top, proletarians and peasants at the bottom. Some
other distinctions stood out as well. The historians Cora Ann Presley
[[link removed]] and Wunyabari
Maloba
[[link removed]] have
chronicled sharp age, gender, and racial stratifications in colonial
Kenya within and across the economic designations of “worker” and
“peasant.” African women and children were the lowest paid for
farm labor overall. Even the highest-paid African men made less than
half of the earnings of the lowest-paid Asian men and one-tenth of the
lowest-paid European men. The stark divides evident in land and
housing continued. The colonial government created racially segregated
urban areas to serve as administrative centers, while reserving the
most well-planned residential centers for whites and more crowded
segments for “Asians.”

Race served as a hierarchical principle of accumulation in the society
the British Empire created, whether speaking of income, land, or
housing: more for whites, less for “Asians,” least for the Black
“natives.” To the racial capitalism theorists, of which I consider
myself one, these sorts of stratifications are social divisions that
are just as relevant for political analysis as distinctions among
capitalists, workers, and peasants. All of these stratifications, not
just the latter ones, help explain why this system stayed in place.

Racial capitalism is hardly only an artifact of the past. It tells us
just as much about conditions in the present and closer to home.
Consider the mounting water crises in the United States, where the
most publicized of these so far has occurred in Flint, Mich. The city
temporarily switched its water source in 2014 from Detroit’s water
supply to the Flint River as part of cost-cutting measures recommended
by the city’s emergency manager. Almost immediately
[[link removed]],
residents began complaining about the color, taste, and odor of the
contaminated water, and General Motors Corporation discontinued its
use of local water. Compounding matters, Flint officials continued to
insist into 2015 that the water was safe to drink.

This crisis was the culmination of a decades-long downward trajectory,
as the geographer Laura Pulido explains
[[link removed]] in
an article: “Flint was abandoned by capital decades ago, and as it
became an increasingly poor and Black place, it was also abandoned by
the local state. This abandonment can be seen in shrinking services,
infrastructure investment, and democratic practices.”

The historian Peter James Hudson reminds us
[[link removed]] that
the term “racial capitalism” is deeply tied to 1960s and
’70s South Africa
[[link removed]],
where revolutionaries like the National Liberation Front
[[link removed]]’s Neville
Alexander
[[link removed]] (incarcerated
[[link removed]] with
Nelson Mandela for working to destroy apartheid) and the South African
Communist Party’s organizer (and onetime lawyer
[[link removed]]) Harold Wolpe
[[link removed]] debated
their contemporaries about the nature of the relationship between race
and class in South Africa’s social structure.

But the global studies scholar Yousuf Al-Bulushi reminds us
[[link removed]] of
the relevance of broader trends and conversations in African political
thought and practice at the time. During these same years, in
Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam school of radical thought and in other
countries, a connected set of researchers reshaped social science in a
radically interdisciplinary direction. They argued that the global
development of colonialism and capitalism had linked too tightly the
history, economics, and sociology of far-flung reaches for countries
or regions to be well understood in isolation. The work of this
Tanzanian community — which included visiting thinkers like the
American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, the Guyanese historian
Walter Rodney, the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi, and the
Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin — helped develop a number of
new directions in left intellectual thought, including what’s now
known as the world-systems theory.

The African American political theorist Cedric Robinson met and
exchanged ideas with intellectuals and activists who had participated
in these communities as he traveled in England and throughout the
African continent. Thus, his classic text “Black Marxism: The Making
of the Black Radical Tradition” developed an analysis that borrowed
from structural insights on the relationship of race, class, and
capitalism developed by the South African Marxists, which he combined
with the global scale of politics influenced by world-systems
theories. As a result, Robinson’s book played an instrumental role
in popularizing both the term and a version of the analysis known as
“racial capitalism.”

To get back to basics, it’s helpful to be clear about what we mean
by both racism and capitalism. To some, racism is a moral commitment
held by individuals and institutions: for example, the explicit
commitment to treat people of some skin types and assumed ancestries
better than others. This view might reserve an accusation of racism
for the most full-throated white supremacist groups. Other definitions
might focus on subtler targets: for instance, the implicit
association
[[link removed]] of negative
ideas, imagery, or dispositions with racially marginalized people.
These ways of thinking about racism prioritize acts, the bad things
people do (e.g., hate crimes) or the bad ways people do innocuous or
even good things (e.g., enforcing neutral policies in a racially
discriminatory way). In this wider view of racism and racists, even
well-meaning liberals may count as racists, or as acting in racist
ways. This line of thinking is embedded in many anti-racist workshops
and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Another way to consider racism might focus on the ways race fits into
or makes up social structures, rather than how racism might
characterize particular actions or actors within those structures. The
racial capitalism family of thinkers and theorists sits under this
broader umbrella. As the American studies scholar Lisa Lowe puts it,
[[link removed]] these
are the theories that begin with “the sense that actually existing
capitalism exploits through culturally and socially constructed
differences such as race, gender, region, and nationality and is lived
through those uneven formations.”

If you ask a skeptical Marxist to define capitalism, the kind of
person who thinks racial capitalism is one word too many, that person
might say something like this: Capitalism is a system that organizes
economic activity around those who control the means of production
(capitalists), who use that leverage to buy the productive labor of
others (the workers) and produce goods and services for exchange.
Through today’s version of this production and exchange, capital
accumulates, making it possible to make even bigger production and
exchanges tomorrow. This cycle repeats endlessly — well, until the
triumphant rise of the workers to dig capital’s graves (if you’re
a glass-half-full type of person) or until we destroy the planet (for
the pessimists).

A racial capitalism theorist needn’t disagree with this basic
picture. After all, this framework doesn’t tell us what is being
produced, where it’s being produced, or who does the accumulating.
It’s possible, of course, that this highly abstract picture of the
world tells us most or all of what we need to know to figure out the
sides of political struggle as the years change: capitalists and
workers. If that were right, it would be a good reason to think racial
capitalism was one word too many, after all. But one reason to
disagree returns to Lowe’s observation earlier: that “actually
existing capitalism” has spread through “uneven formations” of
differences like “race, gender, region, and nationality” and that
these sources of unevenness are politically important. That
disagreement might start from the suspicion that the steady
deterioration of Flint’s water quality had something to do with
which people lived there; that to determine which people in colonial
Kenya got the fertile land and which people got the “reserves” was
to largely determine the colony’s future.

The term “racial capitalism” has been used in many ways by many
theorists, but not all in compatible ways, as the sociologist Julian
Go helpfully explains
[[link removed]]. This
opens the door for potential tensions in reconciling one person’s
claims about racial capitalism with another’s, many of which critics
have continually raised as the term surges in popularity.
Hudson reminds us
[[link removed]] of
one particularly important tension: South African Marxists Martin
Legassick and David Hemson (among the first to use the term
[[link removed]])
focused on claims specific to the South African context, whereas
Cedric Robinson preferred to wield it in a characterization of the
world system as a whole.

In the end, racial capitalism is perhaps better thought of as a set of
questions about how racism and capitalism work than as a separate
theory of what our social system is like. But rather than insisting on
principle how racial stratifications and disparities are “really”
just disguised forms of class oppression (as “class reductionists”
might) or how all social injustices might boil down to the
preservation of white supremacy (as “race reductionists” might),
theorists have simply tried to explain what these different but
related things might have to do with each other. To ask such questions
is simply to pay attention to how capitalism’s restructuring of
production alters the relationships that make up our entire social
world, not just our practices and roles in economic production.

Some skeptical Marxists see racial capitalism as a deviation from
class and proper left thought in its insistence on the tight
relationship of economic relations to broader social ones. But in this
respect, racial capitalism is quite in agreement with orthodox
Marxist
[[link removed]] thought.
The writings of many figures in Marxist history link social categories
to purely economic ones, and this connection is one of Marxism’s
most basic and fundamental insights. This goes beyond the level of
theory to the level of practice: Revolutionaries like Claudia Jones
[[link removed]], Rosa
Luxemburg [[link removed]],
and Alexandra Kollontai
[[link removed]] connected
women’s political rights to the class struggle; Samora Machel
[[link removed]] and James
Connolly [[link removed]] did the same
with anti-colonial nationalism. We would do well to remember that the
Russian Revolution gained a foothold for socialism by way of
overthrowing an empire. The thinking offered by racial capitalism
allows us to “open up, as opposed to foreclose, more complex
analyses,” as the Black studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly
wrote, analyses that integrate thinking about other forms of hierarchy
and marginalization.

You don’t need to be sold on the phrase “racial capitalism” to
understand it. Use it or don’t; the world will be what it is,
whether we subtract a word or add several to any term. What matters
about racism, capitalism, racial capitalism, and any other options are
the ideas underneath and what we do with them. Racial capitalism
offers us a clue: If it is true that racism and capitalism are in a
mutually supporting relationship, then we should expect that any
potentially effective anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles will
also be mutually supporting. Our ultimate goal isn’t to understand
the origins of a term or even its lineage, but to understand the
workings of a world we are trying to change.

_OLÚFẸ́MI O. TÁÍWÒ is an associate professor of philosophy at
Georgetown University. He is the author of “Elite Capture
[[link removed]]” and
“Reconsidering Reparations
[[link removed]].”_

_HAMMER & HOPE is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is
a project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle
and the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of
our movement toward freedom._

_We are inspired by the courageous Black Communists in Alabama whose
lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white
supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are memorialized in Robin D.
G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and Hoe,” from which we take our name.
[[link removed]]_

_We will envision collectively what a better future might look like
and the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking
compels us to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture and
our own movements._

_Our aim is to build a project whose politics and aesthetics reflects
the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded the streets in 2020,
a project that breathes life into the transformative ideas pointing us
towards the world we deserve._

_Come join us. We have a world to win._

_Visit HammerandHope.org [[link removed]] to subscribe._

* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* colonialism
[[link removed]]
* Marxism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]