Paret and Levenson 2024 Two Racial Capitalisms Marxism Domination and Resistance in Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall (2024)

RACIAL CAPITALISM: Marxism and decolonial politics

Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century Living Theories and True Ideas, 2021

This chapter uses the theory of racial capitalism to explore contemporary debates on Marxism and decolonization.

RACIAL CAPITALISM AND BLACK SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 2022

This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.

Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2022

Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and others

2000

Racial capitalism

"Racial Capitalism", 2019

"Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital-usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration-and framework-from Cedric Robinson's influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of "racial capitalism" as a theoretical project. First, the "racial capitalism" literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by "race" or "capitalism." Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson's insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the "forensics of capital" to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson's concept of "social death."

A Marxist critique of Sean Walton’s defence of the Critical Race Theory concept of ‘White supremacy’ as explaining all forms of racism, and some comments on Critical Race Theory, Black Radical and socialist futures

Power and Education

The Three Dialectics of Racial Capitalism: From South Africa to the U.S. and Back Again

Du Bois Review, 2023

The current popularity of "racial capitalism" in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti-and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself.

Between Racialization and White Supremacy: Another Marxist Response to Sean Walton

Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2022

Race, Capitalism, and World Politics

Introduction We live in a world of brutal racialized violence and massive economic inequality. How did the world get this way? How does a violent past continue to exert force on the present? How are racialized violence and inequality related? Can these global conditions be changed? This course tackles these questions through the lens of global racial capitalism. Global racial capitalism means three things. First, capitalism is more than just the study of economic markets. It is a way of organizing life and society that shapes how we act and think politically. Second, racism extends beyond individual prejudice. It is deeply ingrained in this social organization we call capitalism. Finally, this system has always involved politics that extends across borders. It brings people into contact through imperialism, colonialism, warfare, trade, and cultural exchange. This course wagers that this historical and theoretical perspective gives us a better window into understanding our unequal and violent present by looking at how race, class, and power function across borders. Structure of the Course The course proceeds more or less historically, with a majority of our time spent on rethinking the global politics of the 20th century from the perspective of the Global South. We begin by discussing the relationship between racism and capitalism in the 19th century. Here our readings deal with slavery, revolution, and settler colonialism. Though our course proceeds historically, each of the authors that we engage with in the first part of this course demonstrate in different ways how the racial capitalist past is also our present. Our next section rethinks the politics of the first half of the 20th century by focusing on World War and fascism from below. We then turn to what we think of today as the Cold War. From the perspective of those in the Global South, the Cold War was not Cold – nor was the Cold War a distinct phase in global politics. Instead, the Cold War was a time of extreme global racial violence, upheaval, decolonization, and neo-colonialism. In our final part of the course, we will think through how the history of racial capitalism that we’ve learned throughout the course shapes the politics of our present and future. Here we will examine the politics of “Endless War”, policing, homocapitalism and homonationalism, and the potential for fascist revivals in our present.

An Ethnography of Racial Capitalism’s Long Crisis: A Reply

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity