the historical relationship between race / white supremacy and capitalism, & the attendant relationship between race and class, are multifaceted and complex. anyone who tries to tell you that these relationships are settled and simple, that either race or class has absolute primacy over the other, that white supremacy and capitalism aren’t in many ways dependent upon & respondent to each other in how they were formed and in how they continue to shape the world in which we all live, is oversimplifying a question that’s been at the core of a lot of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, & anti-colonialist thought for decades at least. the issue should not be one of conflict–asking “which of these systems overrides or matters more than the other”–but one of synthesis–working to understand how these systems function with and in relation to each other, albeit sometimes in troubled or complicated ways. to have any hope of inquiring into these issues we cannot be afraid of complexity.
the makings of race & the makings of modern capitalism are historically inextricable from each other. if race as we know it today (and specifically the categories of white, Black, & Indigenous american) can be understood as having arisen from european colonialist expansion and the attending enslavement & genocide (/ “removal”) of Indigenous populations, and, slightly later, the more systematic enslavement of and trade in African people–things that, in the late 1600s, began to demand a post hoc explanation as to why some people were subject to enslavement and not others–then, equally, that very imperialist expansion that gave rise to race can be understood as a driving force in the birth of modern capitalism (see especially Fields). and european imperialism and colonialism elsewhere in the world, along with, most recently, neoliberalism, have continued to develop and reinforce the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism (see especially Harris). historical evidence suggests that racism and racial ideology had to be invented and then, in many contexts, had to be taught–and taught diligently–to European peasants, especially indentured servants, in order to suppress their tendency to organise against their masters alongside African slaves (see Federici, 106-107). it took another couple hundred years even after all of this for race to be considered in quite the manner it’s considered in today–as a matter of “biology,” rather than of climate or environment (see especially Harvey). “race” is a set of fictions subject to constant shifting and re-negotiation, & seeing its construction and foundations will require recourse to capital (among other things) at every level.
to claim that race is trans-historical, or that it predates and supercedes capitalism, is to remove race from the circumstances that led to its creation, and therefore to naturalise & to essentialise it. but there is nothing natural or naturally arising about racial ideology or racism.
to claim that racism is an ingrained sense of hatred for non-”white” people that exists in “white” people for reasons entirely unrelated to the material realities of enslavement and colonialist and imperialist expansion, and to the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism as it occurred in Europe and elsewhere, is to claim both that there is some sort of biological or metaphysical truth to the (often troubled) category of “white,” and that there is somehow something naturally detestable about the people who fall outside of that category. on both counts this viewpoint does white supremacy’s work for it. it is also, in its essentials, the accepted liberal view of race, no matter what language you dress it up in.
certainly europeans prior to their colonisation of the americas had cultural and aesthetic ideas and ideals that, viewed through the distorting lens of hindsight, seem to be referencing race, and they’re commonly brought up as early examples of racism & anti-Blackness. indeed, europeans recalled and repurposed these ideas & aesthetics concurrently with the invention of race, subsuming them into the developing system & discourse of white supremacy (and also things like anti-Blackness and colourism). but it’s ahistorical and disingenuous to call this “race” in the context of a conversation in which the term is being used to denote a more specific set of historically contingent (since ~ the very late 1600s) and biologised (since no sooner than the 1850s) ideas & categories.
to claim that race supercedes capitalism, or that struggle against white supremacy is in any way divorcable from, or is even counter to, struggle against capitalism, is also to erase or otherwise misrepresent the legacy of countless racialised peoples & colonial subjects who understood & understand their struggles against these two systems to be inextricably linked. anti-colonial & anti-racist organising have been socialist for decades and it’s downright silly to pretend otherwise. acting like communist or socialist activism & organisation is somehow inherently a white thing is to deny agency & complexity to the many Black revolutionaries, peoples in the Global South, & other nonwhite people and people of colour whose resistance to white supremacy and capitalism provide frameworks for communist organising to this day. socialism is not “white” and never has been (see especially “Who is Oakland”).
of course the other, equally misguided, side of all of this is the tack taken by a lot of white leftists who ignore the roles of imperialism & colonialism in the formation of modern capitalism, ignore the roles that race & colonialism play in creating superexploited subjects in the periphery of empire whose labour can be extorted for the benefit of the ruling class, and ignore the ways in which white supremacy works as an institutional barrier to accumulating wealth for Black people and other people of colour in the West. to claim that capitalism is material while race is merely social, that the relationship between capitalism and race is one of base vs. superstructure (yes, I have really had this argument), or to claim that there is any way to dismantle capitalism without confronting white supremacy, is equally to disregard and disrespect the work & lived experiences of racialised & colonised socialists and revolutionaries.
to disregard any attempt to account for the material realities of race as mere “identity politics” that subvert nonwhite people’s loyalties away from “purer” class struggle–implied or stated to be the only legitimate arena for resistance of any kind–is to ignore how race materially (including, yes, economically) impacts the lives of racialised people. it is also to ignore the role that race has played in subverting the loyalties of white wage labourers against people of colour by giving them small concessions (slightly better jobs & working conditions, plus the mere psychological satisfaction that hey, at least they were white) as incentives against organising alongside working class people of colour. this racial divide between members of the working class needs to be addressed–not merely swept under the rug as an example of white workers working against their own self-interest (as if–while, yes, still worse off than they would be if capitalism were not in place–they did not materially benefit at the expense of other workers). white supremacy and racism need to be confronted in any struggle against capitalism. ignoring all of this is flagrantly to disregard things that Black revolutionaries in the U.S. have known, again, for decades, as well as to express a profound lack of care for nonwhite peoples across the board. and that’s why white leftists get on my damn nerves, lmao.
readings & references:
- Samir Amin, “Imperialism and Globalization”
- Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
- Jenna Brager, “Bodies of Water”
- Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class
- W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America
- Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
- Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America”
- Angela Harris, “Where Is Race in Law and Political Economy?”
- Sean P. Harvey, “Ideas of Race in Early America”
- Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
- “The Making of ‘Outside Agitators’”
- Aditya Mukherjee, “Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain”
- Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation
- David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
- Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story
James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth
- Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
- Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Race in Translation: The Red, Black, and White Atlantics”
see also my “race and capitalism” tag
Published
rip tumblr 