Introduction: If Not Theses, Then What?

I say often that the term 'racial capitalism' is a question, not an assertion or a doctrine but an opening for those able to take it. It is a question about how lives can be spoiled in so many distinctive and seemingly quite separate ways and yet all in the name of the same beast. It is a question about why it is that we seem so far apart from one another despite such parallel experiences of dispossession. It is a question about why the revolution is proving so hard to make, if we are truly all becoming the same kind of revolutionary agent despite ourselves.

Increasingly, I think the word 'puzzle' might be more apt than 'question'.

A question sounds like it might be solved at the level of the discursive, as if we have just not found the right rhetorical flourish to remake life as life.

A puzzle, on the other hand, presents an opportunity for play and for exploration. The pieces are all there somehow. The trick is only to look again to somehow leap into an understanding of how the puzzle can be unlocked.

And, as always, the biggest puzzle of all is how the rich and powerful continue to dominate. What is it about these complex structures of expropriation and exploitation, everyday wounds and not quite-getting-bys, that can continue despite the reliance on those who are getting hurt?

Part of the puzzle of racial capitalism is the reminder that the powerful have to work very hard and deploy extensive resources in order to maintain this violent and violating order. It is also a reminder that the other side do not have 'a plan' - they are also varied, in competition with each other and/or fixated on their own narrow interests. The troubling outcome that is racial capitalism arises from the jostling together of constantly adapting alliances of class interests, long histories of racialized violence and dispossession and the spinning out of ever-emerging processes of differentiation that disrupt our connections to one another. It is not an outcome of some racist masterplan, however much it might feel that way.

What follows lays out a series of puzzles of our time. Some clearly chart back through history. Others are shiny and new for now, presented as the next big thing right up until the point where they are not and some other shiny object or initiative has taken up our analytic attention. In each instance, I try to lay out what is puzzling and why we should care. I try, as far as possible, to avoid ethical critique - I assume all or most readers agree that the violence enacted on human and other bodies in the name of capitalism is wrong. I do not think, however, that the beast of capital is responsive to ethical critique. If we want to slay it, we have to understand how it works.

Introduction to project

The term 'racial capitalism' promises to totalize our knowledge and understanding, leaping over the untidy partial knowledges of dual systems or the parallel logics of intersectionality to unveil a new totalizing narrative. Admittedly, it is a totalizing narrative that encompasses difference and parallel logics within its terms, but it is nevertheless a narrative that seeks to encompass everything. Or, at least, this seems to be what people expect and want - a shorthand term that summarizes all human horror in a single phrase, with the implication that there is nothing more to learn. And perhaps there never will be.

In this work, I am trying, once again, to present an account of racial capitalism that persuades readers of the usefulness of this frame while also acknowledging the constant innovation that runs through the racial capitalism(s) of our time. Most of all, this work reminds us that capitalism is a tricky beast, the stuff of dreams, a colonizer of desire. To do this it moves in unexpected ways. An account of contemporary capitalism that mapped the pain and suffering, but without registering the strange pull on our sense of self, is too easy. We know all too well that capitalism destroys lives. The mystery is our continuing love affair with its promises despite this knowledge.

The overlapping crises of ecological collapse, economic limit and a resurgence of organized and popular violence targeting racialized groups has led to a renewed interest in debates surrounding racial capitalism. This has ranged from the return to excavating the racialized underpinnings of early capitalism, both in the Americas and elsewhere (Leroy and Jenkins, 2021), to a re-energized interest in state violence, including ecological violence, and the economic logics of state racisms (Pulido, 2017), to a re-engagement with analyses of crisis, economic, political, cultural and ecological (Danewid, 2020; Liebman et al., 2020).

This work seeks to extend this discussion to consider the implications of changing conceptualizations of contemporary capitalism for our account of racial capitalism. The discussion here builds on my 2018 book, Rethinking Racial Capitalism, moving on from this earlier discussion of reproductive and environmental crisis to consider the impact of highly discussed aspects of our changing capitalist world. In the process, the work seeks to address the urgent need to consider how capitalism is remaking itself in this time of ecological limit. These are very bad times indeed, and the question of how we might survive together is, necessarily, part of what we must try to understand in our critique of the violences of racial capitalism.

At the same time, and despite the understandable interest in its most violent and dehumanizing impacts, racial capitalism is not only coercive. My suggestion is that it is more useful to think of racial capitalism as a set of processes that distribute populations into racialized categorizations and racialized opportunities as part of the process of accumulation. In this way, processes or techniques of racial capitalism may hold allure or promise gratification or deliver subjecthood. This may be the case even for those who are racialized as subordinate. Although much of what follows focuses on the wounds caused through racial capitalism, I try throughout the discussion to leave room to remember the various investments and partial compensations that may exist alongside machineries of dispossession.

In order to understand this strange formation which seems able to anchor us in racialized statuses even as we are positioned and exploited differentially, we must engage with some key strands of contemporary thinking about emergent capitalism. The pages that follow rely heavily on the important work that helps us to comprehend the advent and direction of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016; Pasquale, 2016; Langley and Leyshon, 2017) and the broader conceptualization of data capitalism (Beer, 2019; Steinhoff, 2022; West, 2019). Admittedly, some of these conceptualizations seek to understand phenomena which are anything but new. However, the advent of systematic thinking about both the disciplinary formations of prisons (Gilmore, 2007; Wang, 2018) and borders (Walia, 2021; Gahman and Hjalmarson, 2019) and the shift in accumulation processes signalled by indebtedness (Lazzarato, 2012) and platform economics promises to unlock a new phase in our understanding of racial capitalism.

My earlier work (Bhattacharyya, 2018) laid out a framework through which to place the historical establishment of racial capitalism in a more recent setting of reproductive and ecological crisis. This sister work builds on this earlier discussion to consider in greater detail how we might understand racial capitalism as a set of practices and techniques embedded in shifting processes of accumulation and of state power.

Each of the central themes promises to illuminate a central question in debates about racial capitalism - that of how value might be extracted from populations through non-wage routes. As racial capitalism is a framework that seeks to understand the racialized division of populations as an element of capitalist development, a central element is the economic segregation that arises from exclusion from the formal waged economy, relegation to the periphery of the formal economy and, perhaps most importantly, the scraping of value from the realm of social reproduction but not through wage relations. The intensification of practices of imprisonment and bordering raises questions about the role of these structures of containment in enabling or safeguarding processes of accumulation. Discussions of platform economics and indebtedness point to the ascendance of non-wage methods of value extraction, to some extent echoing and extending modes of non-wagedness previously concentrated among the racially subordinated.

What racial capitalism?

It is Cedric Robinson's formulation of racial capitalism that animates the resurgent interest in this set of questions, shaped by the reference to Robinson's work within key documents and debates of the Movement for Black Lives and the global take-up of Black Lives Matter (Issar, 2021).

In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983), Robinson lays out a critique and extension of the terms of debate in Western Marxism in that moment. Robinson argues that the failure to register and engage with the Black radical tradition - that is, the history of thought, action and cultural production created across the African diaspora in response to the world-shaping violence of enslavement and the trade in human beings - has hampered our collective ability to understand capitalism and our agency to make change. The three debate-changing correctives offered by Robinson are as...