Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism

Abstract

In this essay the author assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. The author highlights three tensions within the existing literature: (1) whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, (2) whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept “racial capitalism,” and (3) whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity. Existing discussions of racial capitalism implicitly or explicitly raise these tensions, but they do not adequately resolve them. Nonetheless, they remain important for generating further theory and research.

Keywords

racial capitalism racism capitalism Marxism

The term racial capitalism is by now something of a buzzword. It has become especially prominent among historians who are rethinking the relationship between slavery and capitalism (Johnson 2018; Kelley 2017; Robinson 2000). It has also been used by legal scholars, health scholars, philosophers, ethnic studies scholars, political scientists, and, of course, sociologists (Dawson 2018; Fraser 2019; Leong 2013; Melamed 2015; Pirtle 2020; Virdee 2019). As a term, its origins lie in Marxist intellectuals and activists writing in the context of South African apartheid in the 1970s (Hudson 2018; Legassick and Hemson 1976; Nupen 1972). More recently, Robinson (2000) helped popularize the term in his analysis of the conditions under which the “black radical tradition” emerged.

Despite this emerging literature, the relevance of existing discussions of racial capitalism for sociological theory remains unclear. What might the racial capitalism literature teach us about theories or conceptual frameworks around race and capitalism? The problem is that the term racial capitalism does not refer to a “theory” in the sense of a “singular logically integrated causal explanation” (Calhoun 1995:5). The term refers broadly to relationships between racial inequality and capitalism, but the literature does not specify a single set of causal relations or connections between them. Nor does the literature offer uniform concepts or a shared conceptual apparatus. Given this, does the racial capitalism literature—by which I mean the scholars across different disciplines who centralize the term racial capitalism—have any relevance for theory at all?¹

In this essay, I offer the beginnings of an answer by identifying three aporias, or theoretical tensions, in the existing literature. The first tension has to do with the concept of race itself. What does the signifier race in the term racial capitalism actually mean? The second has to do with the inadequacies of existing theory, particularly Marxist theories of capitalism, that the racial capitalism literature is meant to remedy. The third has to do with whether racism is immanent to capitalism or contingent, which in turn raises the issue of social difference in modern capitalism.

In highlighting these tensions, my point is not to criticize or disavow the racial capitalism literature but rather to highlight some of the main underlying themes or issues that I think are generative of further conceptualization, theorizing, and research. Accordingly, although I do not seek to fully resolve these three tensions, I offer some ways we might think about and work with them in a productive manner.

Defining Racial Capitalism

To start, a brief overview of the meaning of the term racial capitalism is warranted. This is difficult, however, because definitions in the existing literature are either murky or differ from one another. Pirtle (2020), writing on the racial inequalities of coronavirus disease 2019, used the term but did not define it. Leong (2013:2190) used racial capitalism to refer to how white institutions appropriate nonwhite identities as symbolic capital. Ralph and Singhal (2020) found that the term is used largely to “explain how racialism merged with capitalism . . . and to highlight coercion and productivity in capital investment and forms of exchange” (p. 857). The South African Marxists Legassick and Hemson (1976) and the National Union of South African Students were among the first to use the term before Cedric Robinson (2000) deployed it, but they used the term to specify the particularity of apartheid, whereas Robinson used it to refer to global capitalism as it first emerged in Europe.

Despite these complexities, it is possible to identify shared features of the term. First, racial capitalism implies that there are deep connections between racism or racial inequality and capitalism. Much of the literature refers to historical connections, such as those between precapitalist racial divisions in Europe and the subsequent development of capitalism (Kelley 2017; Robinson 2000) or between slavery and capitalist development (Johnson 2018, 2020). Maybe this is why so many historians have taken to the concept. But the term is also used by social scientists to refer to more recent connections. South African intellectuals’ and activists’ use of the term referred to how apartheid and the South African economy were mutually dependent. Other scholars use the term to highlight disparities within the working class, which was one of Robinson’s (2000) concerns (see also Melamed 2015:77). Others emphasize how capitalism is presently dependent on violence and dispossession—social relations that conventional theories of capitalism such as Marx’s treat as irrelevant to the system, aberrations from it, or precursors to it (Ralph and Singhal 2019:857). Throughout these usages, the overarching point appears to be to explore and disclose the ways “racial hierarchies can be functional for capitalist social orders” and vice versa (Dawson 2018).

A second component of the term racial capitalism is that it is typically used to refer to global relations rather than capitalism within a single national context. South African intellectuals used the term to capture South Africa’s particular situation, but they insinuated that South Africa exhibited a particular variant of a system that was replicated cross-nationally. Robinson, and others in the same tradition, from DuBois to Oliver Cox, all discussed race on a global scale, exploring histories of colonial conquest, imperialism, and dispossession to make visible capitalism’s relation to race. Historians have shown how slavery was a transatlantic system encompassing transnational and transimperial relations. Racial capitalism, in short, is also global capitalism. The world’s workers constitute, as DuBois (1935) famously put it, the “dark proletariat” (p. 15).

Finally, the racial capitalism concept has political implications. Discussions of racial capitalism among South African intellectuals and activists were explicitly about political projects. After all, if racism and capitalism are intertwined, the antiapartheid struggle also had to be an anticapitalist struggle—and vice versa. “We must come to grips with the assertions of the African masses for political rights and economic prosperity,” declared the National Union of South African Students, “and we must seriously investigate what changes there must be to South Africa’s particular brand of racial capitalism in order to accommodate the fulfilment of these aspirations” (Nupen 1972:2). Walzer (2020) made the political implications of the term even clearer. If racism and capitalism are interconnected, as the racial capitalism thesis holds, then the fight against racism is also a fight against capitalism. But if race and capitalism are not connected, antiracist struggles and anticapitalist struggles must be thought of as separate and distinct struggles, and the struggles must proceed accordingly.

What is the “Race” in Racial Capitalism?

We can now turn to the three tensions in the racial capitalism literature, beginning with the issue of race. This is critical. If the term racial capitalism is to have implications for social theory, it must offer rigorously defined concepts constituting a transposable conceptual apparatus. Surely one of those concepts would have to do with “race.” But what exactly is “race”? The problem is that “race” is not typically defined in the existing literature, so it is unclear whether other categories marking difference, such as ethnicity, are more appropriate than race. Should we be thinking about “ethnic capitalism” rather than racial capitalism?

Robinson’s (2000) work is a prime example. Nearly all scholars claim that one of Robinson’s key contributions is to show that capitalism was forged from precapitalist racial divisions in Europe. Capitalism is “racial,” according to Robinson, “because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society,” and capitalism was built upon that racialism (Kelley 2017; Táíwò and Bright 1996). The problem is that Robinson himself was not entirely clear that precapitalist social differences were actually “racial.” On one hand, he did use the term race in his analysis. “Racism,” Robinson (2000:2; see also pp. 26–27, 66–67) wrote, served to structure “the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” prior to capitalism, and capitalism seized on racism as it developed. On other hand, when discussing some of the presumably “racial” groups in feudal Europe, Robinson (2000:10–11) referred to linguistic rather than phenotypical differences, thus equating racial groups with linguistic groups. In fact, when discussing how migratory and immigrant labor formed the basis for the armies of the Absolutist states and for the production of value in early agrarian capitalism, he oscillated between calling them “races” and “ethnic” groups. For instance, Robinson (2000:23) used the phrase “ethnic divisions of sixteenth century immigrant labor,” and he referred to “national” differences when presumably speaking about premodern “racial” differences.

Given these ambiguities, Robinson’s argument could be read differently from how it is conventionally taken. It is not that capitalism was built on prior racial differences; rather, capitalism served to racialize the preexisting ethnic division of labor, thereby turning religious, cultural, or linguistic differences into “racial” ones to legitimate its new exploitative structure. In this view, racialization—the process of turning groups into biological entities called “races”—was a part of modern capitalism, not its precursor (cf. Omi and Winant 1986). In some passages, Robinson (2000) said this exactly: “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” (p. 26).

Of course, whether “race” preexisted capitalism does not alter the larger argument of the racial capitalism approach, which is that racial differentiation and capitalism are mutually supportive. Still, the tension in Robinson’s work manifests the deeper issue of whether “racial” capitalism refers to race or other identities. This issue permeates Walzer’s (2020) recent criticism of the racial capitalism concept. Walzer points to examples such as Russia and China, where capitalism does not rely on racial differences but rather on ethnic and religious differentiation. “It may be that Muslims are among the most exploited workers in Russia,” he wrote, “but they are mostly Caucasian (some of them the original Caucasians), so we would have to talk about religious capitalism—where Orthodox Christians, not white people, are the privileged group.” On this basis, Walzer rejected the racial capitalism concept as limited at best and analytically debilitating at worse.

Skeptics of Walzer have offered a rebuke: his argument misses the global dimensions of capitalism. At issue is not whether racial stratification articulates with capitalism within any single country but whether it permeates the world-capitalist system. Proponents of this argument could readily assemble evidence to show that, on a global scale, the vast majority of the world’s proletariat, subproletariat, and dispossessed—whether cultivating grapes or coffee on the farms of the Americas, cleaning up office floors in London, or making clothes in the sweatshops of New Delhi—are, to borrow DuBois’s (1935) phrase, “yellow, brown and black.” Against Walzer, this would retain the main claim of the racial capitalism approach that race and capitalism are intertwined.

Yet this scaling upward of capitalism to a global level brings its own complications. It carries the danger of what Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) called “the cunning of imperialist [racialist] reason”: an analytic operation by which U.S.-centered scholars impose presumably U.S.-centric classifications (in this case, “race”) onto the rest of the world, thereby imposing racial classifications into contexts where they might not be operative. We would be obliged, for instance, to impose racial classifications onto Latin American contexts such as Brazil, where the salience of racial classifications is debatable (Loveman 1999; Wimmer 2015). In short, if we are to insist on the global character of racial capitalism, we must assume that analysts’ racial classifications are global as well. They may very well be, but racial capitalism’s founding texts, and more recent discussions, have not sufficiently problematized this tension.²

Can this tension be resolved? One way to do so is to raise the possibility that the racial capitalism concept works best for groups that have been undoubtedly racialized, such as members of the African diaspora in North America.³ Racial capitalism would thus refer mainly to the black ex-slave population, which has suffered some of the clearest and most virulent forms of racism. This might explain why the literature on racial capitalism has focused on African Americans and transatlantic slavery rather than other groups elsewhere in the world. Yet this seeming resolution would significantly reduce the scope of the racial capitalism concept. Racial capitalism would no longer depict a global system.

Perhaps the best resolution is one that arrives through more reflexive research. We can explore how “race” is connected to capitalism in diverse sites and across historical periods, but we must be more conscious about whether we are referring to analysts’ definition of race or a category of practice. Put simply, we can arrive at a resolution only through careful research that more clearly defines “race.”

The Inadequacy of Existing Theory

A second tension in the racial capitalism literature has to do with the relationship between this literature and existing social theories of capitalism, in particular, Marxian theories of capitalism. Animating the racial capitalism approach is the claim that Marxian theories of capitalism are inadequate because they obfuscate the racial foundations of capitalism. For Robinson (2000), “Western Marxism . . . has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications” (p. 317). Historians’ use of the racial capitalism approach is premised on the idea that Marxism does not adequately acknowledge slavery’s role in capitalism or the ongoing importance of colonialism and “primitive accumulation,” which Marx presumably relegated to the margins of his theory (Smallwood 2018). This is exactly why scholars in this tradition insist on the term racial capitalism: because Marxian theory fails to theorize race, we must add the qualifier race to the signifier capitalism.

But what if Marxian theory does in fact take into account race, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, and proponents of the racial capitalism approach merely misread Marx? If so, the warrant, if not the entire premise, for Robinson’s and others’ work on racial capitalism would crater by an unfortunate misreading of Marxian theory. A number of scholars, in fact, already push against the notion that Marxist thought does not account for race, slavery, or colonialism. Drawing largely on Marx’s journalistic writings, they show that Marx not only discussed race, slavery, and colonialism but saw them as central for capitalism. According to this argument, Marx saw race as so crucial for capitalism that his theory saw the true proletariat as black, brown, and yellow—directly contrary to Robinson’s claim that Marxist theory only saw the white European proletariat as the true subject of history (Anderson 2010; Foster, Holleman, and Clark 2020; Ralph and Singhal 2019). If true, the racial capitalism literature is based on a “misguided reading of Marx” (Ralph and Singhal 2019:864).

How might this apparent aporia in Marxian theory be resolved, if at all? It is imperative here to register a distinction between Marx’s theory of capital and his theory of capitalism.⁴ The former is sketched in Marx’s mature social theory in Capital and related writings such as The Grundrisse (Postone 1996). These writings offer a formalized and abstract representation of the inner workings of capital, its accumulation, its contradictions, and its necessary demise through a series of central categories that capture the key elements of the capitalist system. At this level of abstraction, the main categories of the theory (e.g., “value,” “surplus value,” “concrete labor,” “abstract labor,” “capital,” “socially necessary labor time”) are devoid of any historical specificity or social content and as such can be applied to distinct historical phases or social formations (e.g., capitalism in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world or Russia in 1998, or the twenty-first-century global system). Categories of race, gender, or ethnicity are therefore not central, because they are too concrete.

Alternatively, a theory of capitalism refers to capitalist development and dynamics in their empirical specificity. It is meant to explain and describe specific capitalist formations and developments as they really exist in the world, not their abstract conceptual form. This theory can be extracted from Marx’s journalistic writings and other essays, and it is here where issues such as slavery and ethnicity arise: the essays refer to real events and pressing issues in actually existing capitalism, such as the Civil War or the Irish question (Anderson 2010). But these observations or statements on concrete processes and relations such as slavery in actually existing capitalism—that is, Marx’s theory of capitalism—do not disturb or reconfigure his theory of capital, which remains focused on the relations of wage labor induced to a highly abstract level from his analysis of textile production. If and when he did discuss things such as slavery, such as in “The Working Day” section in Capital, he treated slavery as a passing phase or outside capital’s inner logic, a sort of heuristic to better apprehend and illuminate the latter (Marx [1867] 1906:328–30; on slavery as a heuristic, see Smallwood 2018).

This distinction between Marx’s theory of capitalism and his theory of capital helps us better approach the debate generated by the racial capitalism literature. When Robinson or other proponents of the racial capitalism idea critique Marx’s theory for eliding or deliberately occluding race, slavery, and colonialism, they are critiquing his theory of capital, not his theory of capitalism. Here proponents of the racial capitalism approach are on solid ground. Marx’s theory of capitalism does take into account race, slavery, and colonialism, but his theory of capital renders these things marginal at best.⁵ Hence the warrant for the racial capitalism approach: because Marx’s theory of capital does not center race, the racial capitalism concept and the research and theorizing that go under its banner can fill the void. The concept may provide the basis for an alternative theory not only of racial capitalism but also of racialized capital.

Necessity, Contingency, and Difference

The final tension within racial capitalism is whether the interconnectedness of racial difference and capitalism is a logical or contingent necessity.⁶ If, as the racial capitalism literature suggests, slavery and its associated logics of racism have been crucial for the development of capitalism, and if global capitalism today remains intertwined with racial stratification, to what extent are these relations intrinsic to capitalism or accidental? Put differently, is capitalism necessarily racist (Fraser 2019; Lemann 2020)?⁷

For some, the relationship is only contingent. Walzer (2020) argued that in some countries, capitalism proceeds along just fine without racial difference, and if there is racial difference on a global scale, it is historically contingent. Although the vast majority of workers are nonwhite, Walzer suggested that this is not due to any intrinsic logic of capitalism but rather the accident of demographics (because most of the world is nonwhite, the majority of the world’s workers will be nonwhite). For this reason, Walzer suggested we disavow the racial capitalism concept. Alternatively, others claim that racism is indeed intrinsic to capitalism.⁸ There are two versions of this claim. One is that racism is necessary to divide the working class and legitimate the rule of the bourgeoisie. Racism is an ideological necessity of capitalism, justifying its unequal relations (Camp, Heatherton, and Karuka 2019; McCarthy 2016; Taylor 2016). “Capitalism requires inequality,” suggested Gilmore (2015), “and racism enshrines it.” A very different version, coming most predominantly from Fraser (2019), is that capitalism necessarily entails relations of exploitation and expropriation that feed off each other. Exploitation is the extraction of value from “free subjects” through wage labor. But expropriation, which includes slavery and colonialism, extracts value from racialized “dependent subjects” and is what enables exploitation to happen in the first place. Expropriation is “a necessary background condition for the exploitation of ‘workers’” (Fraser 2019) and therefore for capitalism itself. Capitalism is thus logically dependent upon racism.⁹

So what is the answer? Again, it helps differentiate between a theory of capital and a theory of capitalism. A theory of capitalism might demonstrate that race has been historically necessary for capitalist accumulation by reference to empirical reality: historically, capitalism and race have always been intertwined. But the claim that race is a logical necessity to capitalism would have to derive from a theory of capital, not from empirics alone. One would have to deduce, from the categories of Marx’s theory, the necessity of racism or racial differentiation in society. On this score, the arguments for the logical necessity of capitalism’s entanglements with race fall short.

Consider the argument that racism is necessary for capitalism because capitalism requires racist ideology to divide the working class. This is a functionalist argument that is not functionalist enough, for it effaces the logical possibility of functional substitution. We may find that racism has historically always functioned to divide the working class, but in theory other “isms” could serve the same function. There is nothing inherent to the logic of capital that requires race to be the ideology of division (Lebowitz 2006:39).¹⁰ Why not ethnicity? Why not sexuality? Consider Fraser’s argument that expropriation is intrinsic to capitalism and that racial differentiation must be too. It is plausible and indeed persuasive to claim that expropriation is necessary for capitalism, but it is less persuasive to claim that racial difference is logically necessary for expropriation. Gender could easily serve as the main axis of dependent classification (and, to feminist-Marxist thought, it has served that function), as could ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or citizenship. Fraser would have to show that expropriation, and hence capitalism, requires a racial classification as opposed to other social categories. This is a task left unfulfilled.¹¹

A different and possibly more productive route would be to reframe the issue as one of social difference rather than race. Is racism necessary for capitalism? There are good reasons, as just mentioned, to think not. But is social difference of various types (from race to gender to ethnicity) necessary for capitalism?¹² This is more demonstrable, both empirically (by reference to actually existing capitalism) and theoretically (by reference to the logic of capital accumulation). For example, Fraser’s argument about expropriation could be reformulated in the following manner: expropriation is logically necessary for exploitation, which is in turn necessary for capital accumulation, and expropriation requires differentiation among workers. This differentiation could be along racial lines, or it could be along other lines such as gender, but differentiation there must be. Note that this argument logically insinuates a racial component but remains abstract enough to account for other possible identities across different capitalist formations. It can account for racialized slave labor in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world (where “race” was a key axis of differentiation), twentieth-century Russia (where ethnicity or religion might be the important axis), or gender across all these formations.

This is just one possibility. There are others. Chakrabarty (1993), for instance, seized on Marx’s categories of “abstract” and “real” labor to write difference into Marx’s theoretical architecture. “Abstract labor” generated by capitalism refers to a homogeneity among different and otherwise incommensurable labors. It is the register of the juridical free subject. But “real” labor marks have heterogeneity that registers the incommensurability of different labors. It therefore refers to a difference that stands “only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed” (Chakrabarty 1993:1096). Exactly how persuasive is Chakrabarty’s rereading remains to be seen. The point is that this effort, and others like it, speak to theoretical possibilities that the racial capitalism literature opens up but has yet to pursue thoroughly. More could be done.¹³

Conclusion

I highlighted three unresolved tensions in the racial capitalism literature, and I argued that some of the literature’s claims need to be reassessed and rethought. But none of this is to suggest the literature or the racial capitalism concept should be renounced. There are tensions but these are productive tensions. This counsels that we should embrace rather than overthrow the racial capitalism concept. Precisely because the racial capitalism literature contains these tensions, it connects with various existing theoretical debates in sociology while raising important new questions for further theorizing and research. The racial capitalism literature does not, in itself, amount to an entirely new single theory of capitalism or of race. But the problematic it opens up is far too important to ignore.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For comments and suggestions on this essay, I thank Emily Barman and David Roediger. Sole responsibility for any errors is my own.

ORCID iD

Julian Go

Notes

Author Biography

Julian Go is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. His most recent books include Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory and Global Historical Sociology (coedited with George Lawson). He is currently working on the relationship between empire, militarized policing, and racial capitalism.

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