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Histories of Racial Capitalism

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Racial subjugation is not a special application of capitalist processes, but rather central to how capitalism operates. — location: 101 ^ref-14063

Economists, I have claimed, pay little attention to other disciplines, but they really ignore race. — location: 127 ^ref-45997

the struggle over the relationship between “government” and “the market” leaves invisible the extent to which both state and market governance are embedded in raced and gendered subjection. — location: 196 ^ref-10585

the Supreme Court has designed antidiscrimination law not only to avoid redistribution at all costs, but also to protect white supremacy by creating enclaves marked “private” or “social” in which it can flourish. — location: 201 ^ref-33056

“the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.” — location: 552 ^ref-5804

that the emergence of capitalism exaggerated older, precapitalist forms of social difference into racial difference. — location: 563 ^ref-12701

race making was a process driven by capitalist development itself in the form of the slave trade, and it was an “effort commensurate with the importance Black labor power possessed for the world economy sculpted and dominated by the ruling and mercantile classes of Western Europe.” — location: 573 ^ref-59714

The modern concept of race, in other words, built upon but was not identical to earlier forms of difference. — location: 576 ^ref-18299

“this European civilization, containing racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences,” and capitalism calcified those differences into race. — location: 586 ^ref-26544

It can be affirmed without reservations that the white racism which came to pervade the world was an integral part of the capitalist mode of production…. — location: 609 ^ref-9335

“Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth…. When self-evident laws of nature guarantee freedom, only equally self-evident laws of equally self-evident nature can account for its denial.” — location: 620 ^ref-18524

For reasons of culture, religion, nationality, appearance, and custom, the labor of Africans was easier to exploit than that of English indentured servants, “but that did not add up to an ideology of racial inferiority” until the language of universal liberty took hold. Put simply, for Fields, the economic exploitation of enslaved Africans preceded their racialization as black. — location: 622 ^ref-22259

lynching was in fact directed toward upwardly mobile black people, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the nigger down.’” — location: 628 ^ref-26094

Wells framed lynching as a weapon of the Southern capitalist class, — location: 631 ^ref-51720

W. E. B. Du Bois described whiteness itself as “a sort of public and psychological wage” that could quell discontent about the paucity of actual wages among white workers. — location: 634 ^ref-17921

“Capitalist development has occurred not in spite of the exclusion of Blacks, but because of the brutal exploitation of Blacks as workers and consumers. — location: 637 ^ref-61811

“A capitalist/racist state still attempts to resolve problems within the Black community via fraud rather than force, just as it does for whites. Nevertheless, there remains a greater reliance on the omnipresence of coercion aimed at Blacks than at whites.” — location: 641 ^ref-55505

one of the Saint Domingue revolutionaries’ failures was to see their struggle against the capitalist planter class as one primarily of racial rather than class antagonism; for James, this understanding prevented them from seeing whites as allies, either reluctant (French bourgeoisie who remained on the island) or enthusiastic (French Jacobins who might have seen their own revolutionary aims as being in line with those of the enslaved). — location: 655 ^ref-52799

In the same way that the capitalist grew wealthy by claiming the surplus value produced by wage laborers as his own, colonialism “meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped.” — location: 661 ^ref-61096

a future-oriented political analysis that cautions against either a “race first” or a “class first” approach toward social justice. — location: 671 ^ref-51387

the invasion of indigenous lands is not a single moment in time but an ongoing structuring logic in all settler societies, — location: 685 ^ref-10113

racial capitalism marks a historical intimacy among the slave trade, enslavement, and colonialism that often goes unacknowledged, but also captures the way slavery epitomized a racialized system of valuation and extraction that continues to this day. — location: 690 ^ref-29204

the failed effort of Louisiana sugar planters to secure labor in the wake of the Civil War was intimately tied up with their irrational rendering of Chinese migrant laborers as possessing white traits in some instances and the insistence that in others they were “a sorry substitute for our former negro slaves.” — location: 693 ^ref-33555

The end of slavery signifies the malleability and resilience of racial capitalism despite the otherwise momentous nature of emancipation. — location: 699 ^ref-45305

the mortgage as a tool of dispossession rather than accumulation. — location: 718 ^ref-53137

the decision to abolish the slave trade (and eventually slavery) was economic rather than moral. — location: 725 ^ref-35464

The right numbers will not prove the existence of racial capitalism to skeptics; the impossibly large sums calculated by scholars working on slavery reparations or the value of Native land treaties have never been authoritative enough to affirm the central importance of racial dispossession in building the wealth of the global North. — location: 735 ^ref-33783

racial justice cannot be achieved by subsuming it under a generalized call for economic justice; the racially differentiated distribution of suffering under capitalism will not be rectified without a robust analysis of race. — location: 740 ^ref-8994

capitalism cannot be rehabilitated through the inclusion of previously excluded groups; the racial violence of capitalism does not end where political and legal rights begin. — location: 742 ^ref-59011

“Negro workers are not yet fully free in the South. By the same token, white workers in the South are not yet fully free, because no white worker can ever become fully free as long as a black worker is in southern Bourbon bondage.” — location: 749 ^ref-24408

Martin Luther King, Jr. identified racism, capitalism, and war as “the triple evils that are interrelated,” he argued: “A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will ‘thingify’ them—make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically.” — location: 761 ^ref-55934

For King, slavery was the blueprint for economic exploitation, the original experiment with human commodification that made callousness to poverty a part of American social ideology. — location: 764 ^ref-42954

the Negro learned the cruel lesson that social and political freedom cannot be sustained in the midst of economic insecurity and exploitation. — location: 776 ^ref-5699

under racial capitalism, rights become abstracted and individuated, divorced from demands for justice (including economic justice). Rights are de-radicalized and transformed into “the right of capitalists and corporate ‘persons’ to be free from government (regulation and taxation) … individual rights concepts are recruited for the benefit of investor classes by amplifying new cultural norms on the part of government and business to dismiss the needs of others.” — location: 781 ^ref-41972

If race came into being to justify the social dynamics of capitalism, then racial justice cannot thrive under capitalism. — location: 789 ^ref-52466

“black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of state violence.” It is hardly coincidental then that George Floyd’s last words were “Momma … Momma, I’m through,” calling upon his deceased mother in the moments just before his own passing from one world to the next. — location: 1740 ^ref-40187

The immiseration of black women under racial capitalism in the United States and much of the world is correlated with their status, devised during slavery, as the progenitors of blackness. — location: 1762 ^ref-2310

Racial capitalism rejects radical political philosophies that conceptualize race as a troublesome consequence of capitalism. Robinson understood that such formulations consigned the “Third World” and black people to the “waiting room of history.” — location: 1801 ^ref-41480

women’s capacity to literally reproduce racialized labor power—cannot be divorced from any story about the birth of capitalism. — location: 1813 ^ref-2420

Race came to function as both a transatlantic currency and a theology, tethering physiognomy and a belief in intrinsic difference to the concept of enslaveability. — location: 1825 ^ref-52181

The acceleration of the transatlantic slave system welded together race and the chattel principle. If race became the self-evident mark of hereditary slavery at the heart of eighteenth-century racial capitalism, black women’s wombs were the incubators of capital accumulation. — location: 1827 ^ref-39628

The notion that slavery did permanent psychic and structural damage to black people, rendering their families forever incomplete, unnatural, and deformed, was entrenched during the era of emancipation. — location: 1880 ^ref-11568

The explanatory power accorded to slavery to account for black pathology emerged out of vigorous transatlantic debates. — location: 1882 ^ref-7005

Slave emancipation in the United States and the British Empire crystallized racist assumptions about the capacities of black people and the dangers of black freedom associated with the Haitian Revolution. — location: 1900 ^ref-35546

Abolition everywhere marked a significant transformation in the history of racial capitalism. Black women continued to reproduce blackness, but black life was increasingly stripped of the fluctuating monetary value associated with slavery. — location: 1910 ^ref-19924

Partus sequitur ventrem in late-stage capitalism means that poor black women bear black children with “no intrinsic value,” a surplus, disposable population subject to judicial murder or the slow death of incarceration and poverty. — location: 1921 ^ref-39196

As bearers of the hereditary mark of slavery, black women held the dubious distinction of bringing black life into a world that needed it as much as it despised it. In slavery, this meant that black life was to be commodified; after freedom, black life is to be monitored, constrained, or ended with impunity. — location: 1927 ^ref-37647

While all workers at a factory, for example, are exploited by their employer, they experience the social relations of production (i.e., class) through the modality of race62— — location: 1933 ^ref-9449

For black feminists like Lorde, the political could never come at the expense of the personal precisely because exploitation—wage theft in secular terms—penetrated mind and body. They prioritized the preservation of individual and community ontology within broader revolutionary projects. — location: 1972 ^ref-10217

it is the “distinction between peoples rather than distinction between places that gives capital its power, everywhere.” — location: 2535 ^ref-40374

the “production of capital occurred in tandem with the production of difference,” arguing that these processes were endemic to the spread of capitalism. — location: 2537 ^ref-64782

capitalism has demonstrated remarkable flexibility historically, exploiting each new frontier’s unique logics of exclusion and exploitation, where and how it finds them. — location: 2553 ^ref-32752

All laboring bodies were forced to join the world of “free” wage labor, a scaffolding erected by colonial powers and the structures of global capitalism—but this process was enabled in the first place by dispossessions that started much closer to home. — location: 2572 ^ref-22385

According to numbers circulating around abolitionist circles, there were more slaves in British India than had been emancipated in the entire British Caribbean. — location: 2609 ^ref-2023

abolitionists were intent on promoting India as the answer to the labor shortage crisis that plantation owners dreaded. — location: 2624 ^ref-49178

abolitionists, keenly aware of the global monopoly enjoyed by the American South, pressured the British government to consider India as a free-labor alternative for cotton production. As Florio notes, the Indian poor were thus “supposed to do emancipatory work on behalf of America’s slaves”24—not merely physically, but also ideologically. — location: 2629 ^ref-32703

how technologies of violence and discipline perfected on slave plantations were transported to India. — location: 2692 ^ref-59503

as both plantation owners and officials in London debated the merits and risks associated with using labor from different colonial populations. The emergence of strictly demarcated racial categories, each with assigned labor roles, took place in various settings where populations were migrating and mixing with each other—on plantations, on the high seas, and within colonies such as India and South Africa. — location: 2707 ^ref-23017

Within India, African-origin groups were singled out as “self-evident” slaves and freed, unlike Indians, who were trafficked with impunity.43 The conceit of the Indian laborer as free, therefore, was integral to both the initial drive for British abolition and the myth that allowed the engine of capitalist production to keep on churning out imperial global commodities. — location: 2722 ^ref-24167

“capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations.” — location: 2761 ^ref-9349

The very logic of racial capitalism in action cuts through emergent categories such as race, or even caste, in the very moment when these categories emerge as meaningful political vocabularies of analysis—and resistance. — location: 2950 ^ref-14795

Indians were transported to other parts of Asia between 1850 and 1950. — location: 3028 ^ref-61521

President Johnson’s 1865 Proclamation of Amnesty declared a “restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves,” to “all persons who have directly or indirectly participated in the existing rebellion.”4 This policy amounted to a restoration of the oligarchy that had controlled the United States, by controlling the South. — location: 3771 ^ref-10341

The counterrevolution of property in the Colorado River region marked a transition from the interests of a slaveholder oligarchy to those of an agribusiness oligarchy. — location: 3803 ^ref-8312

politics was infected with “the idea that individual wealth spelled national prosperity.” The aim of “this new American industrial empire” was not national well-being but, instead, “the individual gain of the associated and corporate monarchs,” through the concentrated control of finance capital, through managerial and engineering efficiency, and through access to raw materials and market demand that engulfed competitor nations. — location: 4151 ^ref-54351

This new feudalism and its corresponding common sense would be the prerequisites for the rise of the United States to a position of global hegemony. — location: 4156 ^ref-60249

“a new Empire of Industry” that “was offering to displace capitalistic anarchy and form a dictatorship of capital to guide and repress universal suffrage.” In this process, the working class was divided, with black workers placed “not in but beneath the white American labor movement.” In time, “the better-paid skilled and intelligent American labor,” in coordination with “capitalist guild-masters,” formed “closed guilds,” which “fought to share profit from labor and not to eliminate profit.” — location: 4209 ^ref-32141

The refusal to redistribute land and technology fatally limited emancipation. The failure to redistribute income and transform property relations, Du Bois argued, was “a disaster to democratic government in the United States.” Du Bois insisted that a new dictatorship of labor would be necessary to fulfill the revolutionary promise of emancipation. — location: 4295 ^ref-32679

The failure to redistribute land and technology, to fulfill the promise of emancipation, was a historical antecedent of imperialism, resulting in world war. — location: 4300 ^ref-19786

it was in “the very echo of that philanthropy which had abolished the slave trade” that a “new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia” would arise. — location: 4301 ^ref-37901

The task of rebuilding society, he insisted, “whether it comes now or a century later,” would necessitate a return to the core principles of Reconstruction: “Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.” — location: 4308 ^ref-10354

During the Age of Empire, imperialists in Western Europe, the United States, Japan, and Latin America used biological notions of absolute human difference to justify continental inequality and facilitate the extraction of the materials essential to mass production and consumption. — location: 4936 ^ref-20663

“Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry.” — location: 5826 ^ref-28113

black workers generate the surplus value fixed in the machine that they would later be forced into competition with, — location: 5906 ^ref-52334

The enslavement of African peoples constituted the broadest effort to consolidate stores of energy under private ownership. This fact should serve as a cogent reminder that the private ownership of energy necessitates extractive violence, whether the source of that energy is fossil fuels, the harnessed energy of solar, wind, or water, or human labor power. — location: 5911 ^ref-56559

Du Bois demonstrates how contingent relations of production came to be understood as timeless and inevitable consequences of racial difference. In turn, the present conjuncture of fossil capital, in which human labor power is further displaced by the bounty of prior accumulations of capital—namely, industrial technologies and extractive fuels—can only be understood alongside constitutively older histories of racial capital. — location: 5930 ^ref-49388

Rather than an economic system defined by a fixed logic of racial difference, racial capital attunes us to the always contingent relations of race, capital, and extraction that pervade ongoing regimes of accumulation by dispossession. — location: 5949 ^ref-58663

Our task after Du Bois is no less than a redoubled critique of political economy. It is to reanimate the accumulated labor that sits frozen in the form of surplus capital and machinery. — location: 5958 ^ref-11564