class

This paper examines the critique of capitalism provided by the New World Group. Emerging from the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reformation of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. This reformation was broader than the political-economy, it included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds societies West Indians could strive for. Set within intra-Marxist debates on early capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Norman Girvan, George Beckford, and Lloyd Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

Introduction

The plantation was a total social and economic unit, supplemented with a system of routine surveillance to support nakedly unapologetic authoritarian governance that greatly shaped the very horizon of development in Caribbean societies, even long after political independence. Combining vertical relations of domination integral to extracting labour with some limited horizontal relations to aid the day-to-day functioning, the plantation fostered anticipatory obedience and instinctual habituation to unspoken imperatives. While eagerly catering towards aggressively extractive market relations this unit actively dismissed viewpoints that countered the supremacy of market forces. The interplay between domination and egalitarianism enabled processes of creolization leading to new cultural forms in speech, like picong and kas kas; new modes of kinship, like extending fictive kin and religious syncretism. But social and economic relations of production remained rooted in extraction. There may have been individual acts of resistance, but the unit’s overseers stymied democratic change the moment resistance became inconvenient.

Well aware of these conditions, West Indian intellectuals in the post-war era sought to explain the economic structures of Caribbean societies by reference to path determinacy set by European colonial formations and the associated sequestering of surpluses. Known as ‘a Theory of Plantation Economy and Society,’ this body of thought was developed by the New World Group comprising George Beckford, Lloyd Best, Norman Girvan, complimented by people like C. Y. Thomas, H. R. Brewster, Joan Robinson, Owen Jefferson, Gordon Lewis and Trevor Monroe among others, and then joined by Kari Polanyi Levitt and Archie Singham from abroad.[1] This interdisciplinary project had many intellectual tributaries and confluences, in addition to a wide delta of applications and interpretations.^[2] In the spirit of independence, Girvan writes, the theory sought to “reflect the political aspect of decolonization on the intellectual, economic, social and cultural spheres.”^[3] Put differently, one aim of the Group was to decolonize hereto accounts of the ‘general process’ to better comprehend the functional role of race and empire in capital accumulation.^[4]

Emerging from the incubator of the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues at The University of The West Indies, Mona in Jamaica, the Group was formed in 1963 specifically to address the reformation of social and political forces in the wake of Caribbean territories gaining formal independence from European colonial powers. The year before Jamaica had become independent of British direct rule, with University College (as it was known then) severing its ties in the same year from the University of London to become The University of The West Indies. Led by students and young lecturers, this reformation was broader than the critique of political economy. It included psychological and ideological reworkings, all items necessary to evaluate the kinds of societies West Indians could strive for.

Across the West Indies, Independence also brought pragmatic matters to the fore—the need to produce constitutions, currencies, and passports being some basic examples. Well read and highly educated, members of the New World Group knew that independence would not automatically produce tidy democratic states. Formal decolonization and democratization were conjunctures of vicious contest; the stakes were setting an enduring social trajectory. Even to this day, the mythology of Independence in the West Indies sanitizes how in this decisive political moment there was a quick realignment of interests and deal-making as local factions sought to build constituencies to win power electorally, and otherwise occupy the commanding heights of their societies as British flags were lowered.[5] Along with trade unionists, urban radical social movements and the organized poor,[6] these intellectuals sought to better conceptualize the workings of power in their national, regional, and international contexts. They strove throughout to understand how rule by markets was constituted through historical and material forces.

In the case of members of the New World Group this activity was undertaken inside of key state institutions, like public universities, at least in the 1960s. However as the 1970s unfolded some members, like Best, had been driven from these same institutions. Best responded by forming Tapia in 1968, which ran in Trinidad and Tobago’s 1976 election as a political party.[7] It won 3.81% of the vote.[8] Other members like Girvan stayed in academia longer, but left to do development work, becoming the Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States. Although there are some exceptions in more radical spaces,[9] arguably it has only really been since the CLR James Centennial Conference in 2001 that the New World Group has received recognition for their theorizing by members of the local establishment. That said, this ‘bump of a revival’ to use Brian Meeks’ turn of phrase has been selective.[10] The Group’s critique of the US and UK ruling classes are permitted; critiques of the local ruling class remain less welcome.

Set within intra-Marxist debates on early accounts of capitalist development, this paper focuses on the collaboration and creative tensions between Girvan, Beckford, and Best as they helped one another construct their respective political philosophy, social theory, and economic analysis of the logic of plantation societies, which while incomplete from our vantage, did mostly capture the historical dynamics found in the Caribbean. As either founders, editors or key contributors, these three figures are notable for their early involvement in the transnational publication, New World, of which 14 issues were published between 1963 and 1972 between Georgetown, Guyana and Mona, Jamaica.[11] University work was a centralizing force keeping Girvan, Beckford, and Best in frequent contact. The by-product of this close collaboration was that all three had multiple ground-breaking academic monographs which draw upon the work of the others. I will elaborate upon these ties in the third part of the paper.

At the same time I also want to be cautious in this essay to not perpetuate the trope of extraordinary figures. Even while the West Indies is comprised of small societies where interpersonal relations are visible and traceable, it would still be an error to reify any person—they could not and did not have the singular influence of which they are credited. It is better to think more about a generational cluster of scholarship advancing lines of critique and the circumstances that enabled or constrained that critique.

Accordingly, in this paper I survey the arguments and analysis offered by the Group as their historical studies intervene in the debates on race, capitalism, and Marxism. Through doing so, I aim to contribute to a non-European and non-American centric approach to the historical study of racism and exploitation. There are several steps involved in making the argument that the Group has much to offer Political Marxism. The first portion of the paper covers the intramural debates in Marxian accounts for capitalist development. I then turn to revisionist inter-war economic historiography of the Black Atlantic, as this was an archive for the Group’s later synthesis of modernity and conceptualization of how the ‘general process’ involves the realization of civic ascriptions and their associated modes of articulation as they dynamically respond to the imposed demands of production and circuits of accumulation. Looking forward, for my claim that the Group can contribute much to Political Marxism to make sense, it is worthwhile revisiting some standard Marxist accounts of capitalist development.

Standard Marxist Accounts of Early Capitalist Development

The transition from feudalism to capitalism has generated a vast historical literature of which the Brenner–Wood exchange on the Low Countries is emblematic of how the role of race has occasionally been overlooked in the analysis of early capitalist development.^[12] Robert Brenner attributed the development of capitalist property relations there to declining soil fertility and a resultant resource gradient leading to a division of labor within rural commodity production. Farmers subsequently turned to the market to purchase consumptive goods, which in turn created new instruments and urban development. Still, Ellen Meiksins Wood objected that there are “fundamental differences between commercial and capitalist societies.”[13] While granting that the Low Countries had active markets in land, labour, and capital, and some mechanized manufacturing (most notably in shipbuilding), for Wood this society lacked social reproduction predicated upon market dependence, meaning that it lacked other necessary characteristics of capitalism, like the accumulation imperative or the revolutionary need to overhaul forces of production. But in their back and forth, both Wood and Brenner fail to give attention to the role played by the transfer of surpluses from the East and West Indies, or how enslaved people provided the fiscal security for the commercial ventures undertaken by the VOC.

Lest one suspect that these errors belong to Political Marxism exclusively, similar kinds of oversights also exist in the classic debates on manorialism over where and when primacy between urban or rural sectors emerged during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. To briefly elaborate, Pierre-Philippe Rey argues that the process of converting feudal obligations into money rents was external to capitalism, like the already existing practice of expropriating peasant’s surpluses. Guy Bois notes how basic units of feudal production were agnostic to increasing productivity nor sought profit-orientated investment. Instead, small-scale peasant holdings preferred subsistence routines sufficient to meet levies and satisfy ideologies of self-sufficiency. Lords, on the other hand, were primarily concerned with preserving civic hierarchies. Still, as technology (and its organization) slowly improved over two centuries—like village plow teams becoming more efficient—so lords increasingly appropriated surpluses in the form of money. In time these reconfigurations of manorialism weakened feudal institutions and strengthened commercialism that by the 16^th century rural areas had been commodified and many smallholders pauperized. These processes culminated in levies being exceeded by rents, and thus a preference given to the later.^[14] But while Pierre-Philippe Rey and Guys Bois offer strong empirical evidence for their respective arguments, in general they discount the role of international trade with the Western Hemisphere in aiding urban development. Moreover, while it is not quite true that plantations were simply manors taken abroad, neither is it entirely false.

Even Perry Anderson’s more expansive conception of “the feudal dynamic” and its contradictions neglects the role of Atlantic imperialism.^[15] He writes that the “private sovereignty” of the “parcelized” manor weakened the power of centralized authority due to overlapping jurisdictions. Medieval towns took advantage of the uneven capabilities of the state and intra-feudal rivalries to acquire relative autonomy, in turn making them conducive to nascent urbanization as peasants fled serfdom. These developments were not without revanche as the feudal system sought to seize this wealth generated by these sites of agrarian commerce. Against the backdrop of commodity production and exchange, absolutist states emerged. Justified by the traditions of Roman law which emphasised sovereignty and unconditional private property, absolutist states swept away parcelized sovereignty and feudal rights to land. Violence proliferated as national monarchies consolidated, culminating in an inversion of the feudal system; sovereignty became public and property became private.

As Anderson points out, absolutist states were contradictory war machines. They combined feudal era dispossession of rival economies through military force with modern directed economic investment. To direct war and wealth, a bureaucracy was built to collect taxes which weakened the levy system, while also diminishing peasants’ holdings. To offset their lost feudal standing, aristocrats oversaw this planned predation. Being placed in charge of the military and administrative apparatus well positioned them to engage in rent seeking activities. Nevertheless, warfare and dispossession undermined the development of markets, supply chains and the collection of taxes therefrom. And so, absolutist states sought loans from the commercial-financial complex. Over time, these loans represent the relative power shifts in European classes.

New claims, expropriations, and exploitations stemmed from this re-organization of power, but this power was nevertheless predicated upon a primordial conceptualization of trade as a zero-sum exercise. Provided the bourgeoisie produced weapon systems they were granted considerable autonomy which allowed for capitalist forces and relations of production to expand. The primary beneficiaries of early capitalist expansion were aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, who were integrated in the state; what Pierre-Philippe Rey terms a ‘double mix.’ In their respective ways, these classes used the absolutist state to construct a ‘national interest’ to pursue their prerogatives by managing the enclosure, commodification and conversion of existing goods into private property. The costs of this transition were borne by peasants who became cottagers and journeymen who became wage labourers. To the extent they could, these groups resisted and fought a long war against this transition. While Anderson’s account of the uneven and combined development of Europe well primes us to review the unseen, uneven and combined development occurring concurrently in the Western Hemisphere, the account also illustrates how issues of race, enslavement and imperialism are treated as somewhat peripheral concerns in early capitalist development, framed as effects rather than contributing factors.

Even contemporary analysis of capitalist development under-explores the role of race. For instance, reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s ‘double movement,’ Wolfgang Streeck recounts the antinomies of European industrialisation. It brought “expulsion from the land, proletarianization, exploitation, repression and cruel discipline” as well as “emancipation from traditional ways of life, new solidarities, trade unions with the capacity to fight for higher wages and better conditions, and the possibility of industrial citizenship and social reform.” The development of co-ordinated, co-operative large-scale production presented new stakes and techniques over the “division of the proceeds” between capital and labour, which also appeared in the organization of factories.^[16] With their power to strike, labour gained considerable bargaining power, at least relative to other preceding forms of organized production.

In response, between 1840 and 1920 capitalists seized upon new technologies like telegraphy, rotary power printing, the telephone, punch card processing and the like to improve their means of calculation and communication, while taking steps to safeguard this control through intellectual property regimes. Many of these technologies were enrolled to support Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, a project Caitlin Rosenthal characterizes as adapting and refining techniques practiced in the new world plantation system.[17] What was conceptualised as innovative business practices was simply the use of technology to re-establish control on the labour process. In the post war era, microprocessors simply continued this trajectory by consolidating power and control with capitalists.^[18]

To help erode recent concessions and recapture lost dividends, capitalists sought to offset labour power by interpolating workers to their project while begrudgingly commissioning the state to provide welfare programs to quell grievances and unrest. For example, in the wake of the 1968 revolts, European manufacturers cooperated with unions to humanize industrial work to forestall anti-capitalist protests. “Some workers and their representatives gained the right, not just to be informed and consulted,” Streeck writes, “but also to contribute to decisions about work organisation, technology, working hours and training.”^[19] Nevertheless these defensive concessionary tactics were coupled with more aggressive investments in transportation and communication technologies. Factories were relocated to towns without a labour tradition while vulnerable migrants were employed, all this in hopes of preventing worker self-organization. In Britain, the latter was accomplished by importing labour “obviously of a selective type.” West Indians migrants “largely [came] to [fill] vacancies created by the upward mobility of British labour and were acting as a replacement population.”^[20]

Of interest, Streeck does not mention how “crumbs from the colonial table,” as Walter Rodney described it, were used as loyalty rents for the proletariat to create wedge issues. Neither does Streeck refer to how “capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation.”^[21] Where race implicitly emerges as a topic is when he discusses how production was outsourced to the Global South, a process that gained traction throughout the 1990s. “The hellish Manchester of early industrialisation still exists, but on the global periphery,” Streeck writes, “too far away for school trips.”^[22] But as WEB Du Bois might add, there were never school trips to working plantations.

Given Brenner, Wood, Rey, Bois, Anderson and Streeck’s neglect of the role of race and imperialism in capitalist development it is perhaps more than understandable that scholars like Cedric Robinson have complicated relationships with Marxist historiography. Although hardly the first or last scholar to think about the role of race in capitalism, Robinson provided one quintessential account of the role of racial hierarchy by arguing that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”^[23] With brevity in mind, he suggests that the reason European and American Marxists make race-relations incidental and contingent whereas class relations are necessity is because Marxism is irrevocably locked to the West’s “racialist architectonic”. Herein “race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce and power” because racism “runs deep in the bowels of western thought.”^[24] As such, for Robinson there are explanatory limits to Marxian categories on matters of race.

While there is value in critiquing his details, Robinson’s remarks provide a useful prompt for a richer synthetic account of early capitalist development, one which can greatly benefit from the explanatory insight offered by the literature which analyzes the triangular trade in the Black Atlantic. Indeed, the Black Radical tradition is especially good at pressing home the deep connection between (and still reverberating effects of) enslavement in the Western Hemisphere and contemporary capitalism;^[25] what Robinson calls the “dialectic of imperialism and liberation.”^[26] This connection is racial capitalism, a market-system propped up by states that permits, nay relies upon racial and gendered violence as an ‘extra-economic’ means to force reproduction to occur through the market. From this vantage, the capitalism-slavery debate very much informs the race-class debate, the debate about modern state formation and racial formation are all roughly equivalent attempts to plot the realizations of domination and dominion that emerged during the expansion of markets during modernity.    

The Initial Caribbean Counter-Analysis

The reason I have spent a few pages overviewing the debates on early capitalist development is to show the terrain on which The New World Group struggled. Yet even while their analysis emerges from positions on the margins of this terrain, by no means are they marginal to these discussions. In this respect, the Group inherited much from Caribbeanists like CLR James, WEB Du Bois, and Eric Williams.[27] In providing a “counter-culture of modernity”—to poach a term of art from Paul Gilroy—James, Du Bois and Williams had an ambivalent relationship to the centers of analysis, “sometimes as defenders of the West, sometimes as its sharpest critics.”^[28] As such it is instructive to review their interpretation of the histories of, and contradictions in, the global political economy. Doing so allows us to see the subsequent continuities of themes and iteration of topics in the New World Group’s analysis of the role of drainage in uneven and combined development during modernity.

To begin with Williams, he foregrounds the role of mercantile trade wars in the latter half of the 17^th century between major European powers as setting in motion a series of nested contests, amongst which were control over the Western Hemisphere and India. Through private interests and royal chartered companies, Britain pivoted from purchasing goods from the Dutch and instead invested in domestic industry and colonial agriculture. Regarding the Caribbean colonies, anticipating development economists like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson,^[29] Williams demonstrates how due to the interplay of the characteristics of specific crops, land markets and labour demands led to different institutional arrangements. For example, sugar production was particularly labour intensive. This meant that planters initially sought to enslave indigenous populations, but when this finite labour pool was depleted due to genocide, then planters drew upon the English poor and convicts through servitude and indentureship. While there are clear differences between white servitude and black enslavement, these contracts were treated as a property relation thereby providing the template for enslavement.^[30] Moreover, “the capital accumulated from the one financed the other.”

While the Colonial Board unsuccessfully sought to curtail the abuses of servitude, these legal protections did not encompass West Africans. As the legal space was provided, planters turned to mass enslavement to leverage economies of scale for high rates of profit. This consolidated into triangular trade, wherein slavers from Liverpool purchased slaves in West Africa, sold the enslaved to Caribbean planters, then returned with agricultural goods to Britain. This new labour regime led to rapid social change. As an illustration, in 1645 Barbados had 11’200 small white farmers and 5’680 black slaves. By 1667, there were 745 large plantations and 82’023 slaves. A 500-acre plantation in 1640 cost £400, yet by 1648 the price had increased by 3500%. In 1650, its agriculture was worth £3 million, just under £670 million in contemporary terms, and so became a vital component of the wider British economy. To select but one of his examples, Williams relays how “in 1697 British imports from Barbados were five times the combined imports from the bread colonies; the exports to Barbados were slightly larger.” He adds that “little Barbados, with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined.”^[31]

Unable to survive in this market without land to expand into, many whites left the colonies despite incentives to remain, like restrictions of trades and qualified franchises for Colonial Assemblies. A diminishing tax base led Colonial Assemblies to impose high duties on imported slaves to raise revenue, and to which merchants predictably objected. While colonies were contested, in the end “the plantation economy had no room for poor whites,” Williams wrote. “The victims were the Negroes in Africa and the small white farmer.” Intense social inequality of this kind meant that only wealthy planters and the enslaved remained, thereby revealing the general tendency of capitalism. Between 1763 and 1778 London merchants avoided investment in the Liverpool slave trade because they thought it was running at a loss.

Douglas Hall’s assessment of the early 19^th West Indian sugar industry was that irrespective of how “well-equipped and well managed” estates might have been (and many were not), planters “lacked the basic permissives of calculability of success or failure in their businesses. They seldom had any realistic idea of how the enterprise stood financially, or what its prospects were.” Hall relays how British Merchants were aware of how financial illiteracy caused debts and mortgages to accumulate interest.^[32] Nevertheless “industrial expansion required finance.”^[33] And for the bulk of the 18^th Century those best positioned to invest capital were big planters and slave traders.^[34] Concurrently, their wealth allowed them to exert considerable influence as well as the ability to purchase political office which in turns shaped the governance of triangular trade system. In summary, Williams argues that “the contribution of slavery to the development of British capitalism,” specifically the role of the “slave trade [provided] the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England.” The wealth generated by Atlantic trade provided demand for consumptive goods which stoked domestic economic activity. Effectively sugar cultivation in the West Indies provided solutions for the various economic crises in Europe, meaning that the so-called periphery was at the center of European capitalist development. In short, ‘slavery drove growth.’ For Williams, this system only ended when planters’ desires for monopoly threatened profits and expansion in other sectors.

Given that context creates conceptualization, Williams argued that depending on land and labour colonial economic formations divide into two models. The first was “the self-sufficient and diversified economy of small farmers, while the second “has the facilities for the production of staple articles on large scale for an export market,” and can be illustrated by the American and Caribbean colonies respectively.^[35] Accordingly, while they write about 18^th Century Caribbean agricultural production and 19^th Century American industrialism respectively, there is comparative value in comparing and triangulating James’ and Du Bois’ insights into race and capitalism. In doing so they offer good templates to go beyond provincializing accounts by noting the global nature of capitalism.

James’ analysis of 18^th century capitalism vividly demonstrates how systematic sexual violation, starvation, racialization and natal alienation were inseparable from the balance of payments in international trade. Against the backdrop of the shifting balance of power in Europe, the wars to capture these spaces generally testify to the value of colonial agricultural production and extraction: few states would bother if it was not ultimately profitable. Similarly, James notes how the possession and repression of the enslaved became central to the ruling ideology of San Domingo. This ideology included latent fear of insurrections by the 500’000 enslaved, or the enslaved being recruited by invading armies.^[36] Within this context James provides a social history of mutable identities, one in which politics greatly shapes interests and affiliations. As an example of this refusal to flatten thought, he details the antagonisms between the Governor and the Intendant, given that “the source of its power [was] so many thousands of miles away.” On the eve of the Haitian revolution, the Governor had just over 500 personnel to act as “a counterweight to the power of the planters in the small whites of town and country,” who numbered “about 30’000.” Ideologically opposed to budding absolutism and independently minded, the bureaucracy “frequently encroached on the Intendant’s administration of justice and finance,” but themselves lacked capacity for the reach and enforcement of rule.^[37] Building upon these cleavages, James’ language of “small whites” and “big whites” is analytically perceptive. For example, most of the big landowners and rentiers—big whites—lived in Europe and employed white labour—small whites—to safeguard their property.^[38]

Neither did James shy away from discussions of how racial hierarchy intersected with differentiated class positions themselves shaped by alliance building, and aspirations of upward social mobility.^[39] Small whites were reticent about Mulattos’ rising social status: while Mulattoes’ increasing wealth was resented, small whites courted them lest they “swell the ranks of their enemies.”^[40] While big whites sought an alliance with Mulattos to suppress revolts, nevertheless the French Assembly worried that “to give rights to Mulattoes who outnumbered them would be to hand over the colony, military and civil, to these bastard upstarts and their allies of the counter-revolution.”^[41] Similarly, the dividends from enslavement were a source of factional contests within European states. For example, James points out how in the wake of their revolution, the French Republic deemed the colonial surpluses vital to consolidate rule, both internally and externally, while creditors, not wanting to lose their investments, went to considerable lengths to protect their property which eventually culminated in the 1802 expedition to put down the revolution. In the end, supposedly the freedom of some required the enslavement of others.

Notwithstanding politics and positions—and he places considerable emphasis on these in his analysis—James’ indictment is systematic, as one of his most famous passages illustrates: “There were good and bad Governors, good and bad Intendants, as there were good and bad slave owners. But this was a matter of pure chance. It was the system that was bad.”^[42] This system was not localized, confined to a specific place and specific time, but rather the realization of a dynamic tri-continental economy designed to perpetuate subordination which was maintained by routine acts of extreme violence. James’ analysis illustrated how enslavement was not residue of a by-gone era, some pre-capitalist endeavour that wage-labour surpassed, but rather was emblematic of a mature supra-national capitalist system that could only be escaped through savvy revolutionary action.

Turning to the United States Du Bois discusses how enslavement created a subject of capital and white supremacy which became an immutable category and an indicator in racial formation. “Black labor became the foundation stone not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale,” Du Bois wrote.^[43] The effects of this consolidating racial formation were not confined to the United States, rather “new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor problem, involving all white labor, arose in both Europe and America.”^[44] Du Bois’s analysis argues that racial formation was leveraged to extract surpluses that were then transferred across the Atlantic.

In the empire of cotton enslaved people were both labour and capital. As for the later, in the 19^th century British merchants made advances to American cotton planters, who in turn used this credit to produce, hoping to use slavery to cover expenses and gain a profit. Likewise, “sugar cultivation” Williams wrote “was a lottery.”^[45] The enslaved were the collateral upon which advances in this mode of production depended. In the early part of the Atlantic slave trade black women were disposable, but once colonies settled, as the slave trade was outlawed, so Black women became integral components to reproducing the whole. The system relied upon sexual violation to produce capital. As commodities and capital themselves, through reproduction Black women produced capital for planters. One consequence of this rich analysis of the social relations of production showed the historical interconnection of the global geographies of commodity chains, labour processes, and class and civic ascriptions, and the silences around the peculiar institutions that formed the bedrock of the accumulation of capital. Accordingly, the social history of the white European working class cannot be separated from the entitlements, privileges, wages, and spoils of whiteness, which was used to make demands for political rights and higher social standing.

In summary, the core features of capitalism are racialization and instrumentalization, commodification and securitization, financialization and violence, with cascading effects felt the world over. During the Black Atlantic sphere of circulation, new grammars of difference came to justify and legitimate enslavement, which in turn produced a myriad of class, status, and identity distinctions. This returns us to the work of Robinson. He argued that there were severe limitations to orthodox Marxism and black nationalism. He found in both a common dogma; fictitious essentialism that produced uncritical narratives about the proletariat or Black subjects leading credence to the belief that capturing the commanding heights was sufficient to change patterns of domination. But in assuming that identity gave rise to political consciousness these projects neither had an adequate understanding of domination nor the basis of its institutional implementation. Inter alia simply changing the names and faces of the people in charge would be little genuine democratic emancipation, points that harken back to James’ analysis of the Caribbean. Rather, what was required was a programmatic agenda that channelled the Black revolutionary thought that encountered the raw violence that sustained tri-angular trade.

In their respective ways Williams, James, and Du Bois identified an Atlantic political economy where the movement of people, goods, and surpluses in this sphere of circulation directed the rise of industrialism. This system was spatially differentiated, had a global division of labour as well as several modes of articulation, but nevertheless comprised a single system. Within the proletariat, metropolitan whites received loyalty rents for their affiliation with this system, which included status and other civic ascriptions that were initially plotted against the enslaved and then later colonial subjects. In addition to entitlements, small whites received a (narrow) share of the spoils from the imperial system, calculated to be just enough to divide the proletariat, quell moral dilemmas, and stall class struggles. The dialectic between whiteness and blackness takes place against the backdrop that is the dialectic between metropole and hinterland, between empire and slavery, all mutably co-defined. In short, the legacies of imperial class relations connect capitalist exploitation and racial distinctions. And so there is nothing to gain from giving analytical priority to Europe over Africa, factory over field, white proletarians over the black enslaved. For Williams, James and Du Bois there were no distinction between histories of modern slavery and histories of capitalism, the distinction between them only seeks to propagandize in capitalism’s favour. It was this analysis that brought incredulity from the European intellectuals. “For years,” James wrote, “we seemed, to the official and the learned world, to be at best, political illiterates.”^[46]

The Theory of The New World Group

As I suggested in the previous section, pressing against ‘white ignorance’[47] the Caribbean critique of political economy produced a unique social imaginary that offers a credible counter-analysis of modernity. This counter-analysis is at the heart of a Caribbean lineage of imaginative acts of self-invention that seek to find new, and arguably more potential for, just social relations. Doing so was an inter- and multi-disciplinary venture. For example, Girvan noted that the New World Group deliberately courted the views and insights from “historians, poets, literary critics, economists, political scientists, sociologists and journalists,”[48] linking their views with the pursuit of a Caribbean critique of political economy. For Girvan, the Group was a “demonstration of the potential for the development of a unified Caribbean consciousness, and of the feasibility of collaborative efforts that transcend the sterile divisions of discipline, occupation and territory.”[49]

From the main three protagonists, Beckford’s contribution was perhaps the strongest, if also the least known, because his work was essentially the Caribbean counterpart to Marx’s detailing of the social transformations in England between 1750 and 1850 brought by capital. In greater detail than Williams, and with a wider lens than James or Du Bois, in Persistent Poverty Beckford describes a metropolitan economy centred on London and other European ports.[50] Merchants and emerging industrialists provided the working capital for New World planters. Planters worked with colonial land proprietors, where contracted to provide agriculture, and imported enslaved persons to work the field and serve the house. Some of the enslaved escaped to form Maroon communities. In compressed form, Beckford described the Atlantic economy with its various class, race, legal and occupational components as these work within and make institutional frameworks that govern the use and abuse of power. The ultimate end of this project was to externalize costs in the Caribbean and repatriate benefits out of it, stoke racial conflict to redirect local energies, then create a local elite that was both psychological dependent and ideologically affiliated with metropolitan interests.[51] Unable to be fully captured by equations, all these relations and structures factor into the long run determinants of import and export prices.

Although close friends, Best thought that while Beckford did generate a robust and dynamic “theory of income distribution” wherein metropolitan merchants exercised first claim, it was through “a quite gratuitous embrace of the cosmology of historical materialism.”[52] Still, it was this gratuitous embrace that Beckford used to demonstrate how capitalist-directed investments and the rationality of profitability explains the location of particular industries on the world scale, while the falling rate of profit is offset by ever more severe repression of the enslaved (and later apprenticed) workforce. Beckford’s agenda to redress these issues is standard—land and property regime reform, significant redistribution, economic integration—insofar that social scientists generally understand that these actions aid egalitarian goals. One difficulty, Beckford admitted, was the legitimation required for these domestic policy targets, especially when there was much psychological dependency. And so Beckford charted a James-like revolutionary course: “change must begin in the minds of people, relating to the concept they have of themselves.”[53]

For his part Best, along with Levitt, argued that colonial governors had designed domestic economies to ‘simply be’ hinterlands of exploitation revolving around a kernel of enclave mono-crop production. Although these plantations had weak formal linkages to other local industries they nevertheless constituted “a well-defined set of institutions” and “a distinct pattern of economic behaviour.” To wit: “our central hypothesis,” they write, “is that this legacy represents an endowment of mechanisms of economic adjustment that deprive the region of internal dynamic.”[54] At stake in this theorization was the viability of the Sir Arthur Lewis’s model of development, which to simplify for present purposes is a social democratic economic conjecture about the necessity and suitability of foreign capital in facilitating national development strategies. Sir Arthur Lewis proposed that because Caribbean countries had cheap labour, they were well positioned to discard the production of staple goods and instead industrialize if external capital was courted. Capital inflows would subsequently restructure the economy generating, in time, local capital that could be redeployed to produce social goods. Effectively within this ‘dual economy’, surpluses could be concentrated then redirected for national development goals.[55] Best recoiled at this suggestion: blacks were more than a source of cheap labour. “Our fundamental difference with Lewis was not that he saw imperialism and foreign capital as part of the solution while we saw it as the heart of the problem,” Best wrote.[56] Put differently, his work insisted that the Caribbean industrialization projects were a continuation of metropolitan interests restructuring and under-developing the region, with the one major change in the post-independence period being administrative. Colonial officials were replaced by local elites acting as compradors while erstwhile continuing the elite enrichment practices of their forebears.

There is another area where the Group had useful insights, and this was the critique of orthodox post-war development economics.[57] More than his companions, Best was the most willing to appreciate the limitations of the epistemic capabilities of development economics, but also preserve it. Rather than the kind of Leninism Beckford deployed, or the kind of dependency model Girvan gravitated towards, Best thought that advances in method would come when led by Caribbean imagination. The difficulty was that Best’s skills as a political philosopher lagged his skills as an economic historian. His views around ethnicity are a good example of this. Best maintained that Marxists treated race ‘simply as’ a class problem, not a distinct set of prejudices that constitute society in their own right. By contrast he foregrounded ethnicity to such an extent that it became akin to ethnic reductionism wherein “class is merely a special case of ethnicity”[58] To tease this out, Best believed that social bonds precede property relations, that class analysis properly conducted discounts meaningful cultural attachments. The chief difficulty with this conclusion is that it neglects that Marx’s critique of alienation tackles the same ground; that the commodification of labour upends the social bonds that humans wish to freely pursue.

Lastly, Girvan had a much greater interest in demonstrating how multinational extractive industries, whether sugar in Jamaica, bauxite in Guyana, or oil in Trinidad and Tobago did not serve the interests of Caribbean people.[59] Many of these were contemporary empirical studies of firms, sectors, and complexes in the 20^th century. Girvan undertook them primarily to show how the development strategies adopted by West Indian governments were unlikely to generate self-sustaining growth with full employment because their economies were structured to be perpetually dependent on metropoles, consistent with the models created by Beckford and Best. Notwithstanding their respective differences, the common theme of the New World Group was economic dependence to metropolitan interests and the work of local collaborators and compradors to legally entrench that dependence. As an alternative Girvan proposed enhancing regional economic integration through a Caribbean Free Trade Association, a point which generated considerable technical debate, and which I will address in the next section.

Given pressing matters of governance, how these political economists conceptualised decolonization as involving both thought and action had a sizable impact in the postcolonial English-speaking Caribbean. Beckford provides a tidy statement of the New World Group’s agenda: “Our aim remains clear: to promote radical change in all aspects of Caribbean life and society so as to release the long-suppressed creative energies of the peoples of the region”.[60] Still the Group insisted that historical analysis had to be the starting point for a development programme capable of producing a synthesis which could temper the warring ethno-political blocs that traversed the region. In doing so the Group challenged the intellectual and disciplinary insularities of economics in the mid-20th century. “Self-consciously adopting the perceived interests of the people,” Michael Witter writes “these scholars waged a long and distinguished struggle against the ideas in economic theory that justified and rationalized the disenfranchisement and exploitation of the working people.”[61] Attentive to history but not beholden to it, altogether their analysis of the path dependency borne from early capitalism sought to better account for the role of race and class in modernity. Equally important, the plantation theory was purposefully antagonistic to modernization theory, which was prescriptive in international development agencies during the period when the Group was active. Contra modernization theory, the Group argued that development was not possible based on a set of ‘prudent’ policy choices because the legacies of colonial policies meant the local economy was built to cater to the imperatives of metropolitan capital above all else. In short, economic configurations had a material history, and in the Caribbean these configurations were resistant, if not wholly antagonistic, to democratic desires.

Although some participants like Lloyd Best were feverishly anti-Marxist, the New World Group’s theorization can best be understood as an intervention in intra-mural Marxian debates through front loading issues of racialization and the class characteristics of a global division of labour. At stake here was to what extent were Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression.^[62] These were not ill-informed critiques. For example, while at Oxford, Best was frequently Stuart Hall’s lunch companion when the later was editing Universities and Left Review.[63] Conversely for Girvan, what deficiencies existed in Marxism were of application, not foundational or methodological.^[64]

In this regard the Group had several main contributions to post-war 20^th century social thought. Building upon the observation that sugar plantations were different from tobacco plantations, tenant plantations were different from company plantations and so on, they sought to explain how these differences conditioned subsequent political structures. For example, in Appendix II ofPersistent Poverty, Beckford outlines four primary types of plantations: company, tenant, family and state. While they all are characterised by a “high degree of central control and co-ordination” they are distinguished by forms of capital at disposal and the ratio of assets on the books between land, machinery, and the enslaved. For example, the bulk percentage of investment for tenet and family types was in land, while for companies it was in equipment, processing machinery, and enslaved persons. These differences are also expressed in management. Resident family plantations tended to combine ownership and management roles, while tenant farms had supervisors. Company plantations management tended to be on behalf of owners living abroad, and it tended to be more authoritarian and sought to undermine the community in which it was located.^[65] These differences explain the specific nature of politics in and over Colonial Assemblies. To simplify for this paper, family and tenet planters sought representation, while state and company plantations undermined those initiatives.

Second, the Group sought to correct for economic and ideological dependence on the West; demonstrating how plantations and multinational corporations were the institutional means keeping Caribbean economies stagnant,^[66] while framing any resistance to the retelling of capitalist development from the Caribbean point of view as intellectual institutional racism. In this spirit, the Group was aware of the historical contradiction between liberal universalism and the lived experience of enslavement and colonialism. For example, in the Caribbean, legal codes enforced racial segregation and subordination. It was not rule of law, but rule by law. In this vein, they had extensive discussion about neo-colonialism, that being fiscal rule without occupation in the post-independence era.^[67] In short, the legacy of centuries in a colonial condition would not be wiped out merely by a legal instrument conferring constitutional sovereignty.

Accordingly, arguments around reparations are not confined to fiscal concerns. It involves decentering notions of justice that arise from the standpoint of the Northern metropolitan bourgeoises. Taking its place would be approaches that foreground the dialectical relationship between the South and North, seeking to account for native genocide - approaches that also acknowledge the ways in which gendered and racialized social reproduction occurred through stratification and subordination were pivotal.^[68] When doing so, this line of analysis demonstrates that race and class are different realizations of generative logic which aims to subordinate people to the global operations of capital, that they are both expressions of relationships to the means of production. Altogether, the Group outlined a conception of justice predicated upon attention to extensive harms caused by long causal production chains that developed during the modernity.^[69]

The great value of the Group was to conceptualize then demonstrate how multiple historically contingent modes of domination co-articulate in ways that can amplify or dampen one another. Through mutual reinforcement or occasional antagonism, these modes have their own effects. This granular approach allows scholars and researchers to identify the mechanisms by which capitalist rule occurs in a specific times and places, and how this rule is connected to other times and places. For example, if Robert Paxton is correct to note how fascism is the application of technologies of colonialism to subjects in the metropole^[70]—like how factories and the task system were tested in the Caribbean before being imported to Europe—then the Group offers a prescient critique of how and why authoritarian tendencies are presently emerging in the North. The point is not about blowback (or even comeuppance) but about the geographic connections of contemporary governance. In doing so, the Group’s scholarship reaffirms how the subordinated have a history of responding to unfavorable conditions not solely with agony, but with political acumen. Acknowledging this reality can greatly improve the contemporary analysis of value struggles as well as accurately comprehend the authoritarianism consolidating the world over.

In the post-independence period the Group took stock of the various contradictions, competitions, and antagonisms that circulated in the social life in the West Indies and suggested that efforts to induce modernization were short-sighted. Rather as Best wrote, first it was necessary to “erode the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the old order so as to guard against the mere substitution of one political elite for another.”^[71] This agenda put the group in conflict with the post-independence political class, whose budding radicalism was tempered and redirected into cultural nationalism.[72] For example, contra the views of notable Caribbean political economists like Sir Arthur Lewis who thought that Caribbean development was hampered by unemployment and a weak local capitalist class and so required ‘industrialization by invitation,’ James stressed how propensity could be achieved through labor taking a greater control of production. Effectively, moving Caribbean societies from an agricultural base to industrialism would likely prove difficult unless there was greater attention to the legacies of colonial governance created by racial capitalism. In summary, for James emancipation can best be achieved through a social reconstruction of the way people relate to one another. Sadly, James’ views did not prevail.

Legacies of The New World Group

So what of the impact of the Group? Given that he spent time in James’ London reading groups and wrote for the Group’s journal,[73] Walter Rodney’s work on the history of capital in Africa can provide an example of the operationalization of the Group’s conceptualization of capitalist development, a topic discussed in the beginning of this paper. Rodney’s thesis is that over centuries, the war machines Anderson describes were used by European imperialists to loot and otherwise reverse African social development. “The wealth that was created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential,” he wrote.^[74] Simple, but hardly simplistic. Echoing Williams’, James’ and the Group’s insight that so-called peripheral spaces were not marginal to global economic flows, Rodney argues that it is the prevailing ideology that marginalizes and diminished Africa’s central role in the expansion of European capitalist development. Indeed, the human and ecological damage was so intense and so enduring that only “an act of the most fraud” could “arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad.”^[75] This looting—accumulation by dispossession in current parlance—reflected capitalist tendencies to forcefully exploit humans and nature to produce wealth for a few by immersing the many.

To wit, between 1445 and 1870, Portuguese, French and British mercantilism enslaved Africans for use in their Western Hemisphere colonies. With trade narrowed to the enslaved and a few other goods, as well as with depleted labour, and social shockwaves of internal conflicts for enslavement, this undermined the development of African productive capacities. Technical stagnation, even in regions not directly affected by enslavement, was the result. “A loss of development opportunity” that was “destructive…or at best extractive.”^[76] From 1870s onwards European capitalist states occupied African territory to extract raw materials like metals and so on. The sad contradiction was “what was called ‘profits’ in one year came back as ‘capital’ the next”, Rodney wrote, “what was foreign about the capital in colonial Africa was its ownership and not its initial source.”^[77]

As in the Caribbean and North America, racist ideologies sought to justify this naked power restructuring Africa from Cape to Cairo. And like enclosure before, policies were designed to make Africans build infrastructures for extraction and the means of their oppression. Peasants were turned into wage labourers and a reserve industrial army. Subsistence farming was replaced by cash crops. Political organizations were outlawed. Suitable local agents were cultivated that by independence, the African nationalists who came to power were “frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology of their bourgeois masters.”^[78] Rodney’s analysis demonstrates the explanatory utility of the Group to understand the dynamics of post-colonial institutions, norms, and relationships, and how these same things undermined universal needs. In short, Rodney uses his initial situation in Caribbean social theory to argue for matters pertaining to (neo)colonial economic drainage, facilitated by compradors who themselves partake in practices of elite enrichment, often at the expense of workers. As Rodney’s work demonstrates, the Group had an influence in shaping the agenda in the critique of neo-colonialism.

The New World Group had other intra-Caribbean discussions that revolved around how independent Caribbean countries be part of the late 20th century world economy. In short, the terms were whether these countries would be vulnerable to metropolitan capital inducing competition between countries if they industrialised independently of one another, or whether it would be more prudent for the region to form a trading bloc. While generally against Sir Arthur Lewis’s industrialization agenda, the Group was split. Best and Beckford argued that the Caribbean consisted of distinct differently plantation economies with associated institutions, meaning that any regional agreements had to take account of these factors. This observation was related to the debate on pluralism: was the Caribbean composed of plural societies with persons who only shared functions to produce, as M.G. Smith argued, or were there other unifying factors, again like worldviews and social values, as R.T. Smith had argued. Ultimately this theorization amounted to little as the new ruling class endorsed and implemented the Lewis model because it allowed for more opportunities for elite enrichment.

It is beyond the purview of this paper to extensively discuss why the Group disbanded in 1973, “why...this rich flowering of creative, Pan-Caribbean intellectual effort [withered], and eventually died,” as Girvan wrote. For most members, the fracture was nominally over debates about the Caribbean Free Trade Association in Trinidad and the Rodney Riots in Jamaica that played out through unreconcilable personality clashes. Another common explanation is that a younger generation of scholar-activists like Walter Rodney and Trevor Munroe did not share Best’s hostility to Marxism, nor did they treat it as an ‘imported’ ideology. Conversely, Best argued that the younger generation were impatient to take political power while being ill-equipped to govern well. For his part, Best was wary of Caribbean Marxism, which he thought displayed neo-Stalinist tendencies and was prone to “simply fudge from Monthly Review.”[79] Instead, a prerequisite course of action was to “erode the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the old order so as to guard against the mere substitution of one political elite for another”, Best argued.[80] (Best’s assessment would only grow stronger from the mid-1980s following the Grenada Revolution, a moment where as Charles Mills wrote “the left spectacularly discredited itself.”)[81] Another immediate reason is that the Group’s scholarship did not have much purchase within the rising Black Power movement.[82] But these accounts are rather unsatisfying because while they may involve events in history, regrettably they are insufficiently historical. Rather the rollout of neoliberalism in the region did much to reorientate scholarship away from critical questions while positioning potential collaborators as present competitors, as I explain below.

With the passage of time, the failure to form the West Indian Federation ever more appears to be a key political error for the Anglo-Caribbean. As Girvan writes, regardless of the design at the time, the failure to pursue economic integration meant there was little material delivery to support the ideals of independence. “Insular statehood”, he writes brought about a situation where “Caricom economies are probably more dependent, with less autonomy in policy-making, than fifty years ago.”[83] The result is that their economies are more susceptible to global recessions, meaning many countries that would have been in the bloc have had to relinquish policy control in any case, but now it is the IMF whose austerity programme is even stringent by the standards of those that endorse that policy course. Structural adjustments have caused a cascade of other problems, like dependency on food imports, criminogenic environments that aid transnational crime networks, extremely high murder rates, and compromised political systems. Granted Caricom has commissioned innumerable technical reports on economic transformation, but as Girvan notes, regardless of the soundness of these policy suggestions, they lack sovereign legal enforcement. There is, he writes, “no real machinery to ensure implementation.”[84]

Another factor in the wain of the Group’s influence can be attributed to the rise of neoliberalism and its local impact on the production, circulation, and consumption of research and scholarship. For the most part Anglo-Caribbean social scientists were on hand to undertake commissioned research, consult on policy, or undertake technical reports for governments and international organizations. Undeniably government contracting re-directs the focus and efforts of research activities while also greatly narrowing the scope for radical analysis and critique. Writing in Jamaica, Brian Meeks testifies to how nascent neoliberal hegemony “contributed to a hermetic atmosphere in which many intellectuals abandoned the occupation of creative thinking for narrowly conceived consultancies”; lamentably, “little has changed” Meeks writes in “thirty years” hence.[85] One consequence was intellectual flight abroad, “to migrate to a place where the university professors and their projects where still valued.”[86]

Meanwhile as neoliberalism consolidated in the Caribbean in the 1980s, so social scientists found that they could supplement their incomes by conducting research for NGOs, development banks, and international organizations. There was also the prospect of earning dollars or pounds through overseeing research directed by foreign universities. For radicals facing entrenched administrators who frequently saw little value in critical projects, like Best did when Sir Arthur Lewis was principal of UWI, Mona, they left the academy to pursue private ventures.[87] Given the already small pool of academics, the shift from focusing on publishing critical peer-reviewed scholarship to unpublished internal consultancy reports curtailed the dissemination and preservation of critical ideas, but it also reflects how the international political economy more broadly shapes how and what gets studied in the Caribbean. Migration also shaped the scholarly agenda as many academics emigrated. With the main site of Caribbean Studies moving to North American and the UK academic spaces, so Meeks is very adamant that academics studying the Caribbean were “insulated from the worse corrosive effects” of local experiences of neoliberalism; with distance these scholars were more willing to forgive the local political class their sins. In these conditions, each successive generation of diasporic Caribbeanists overlooked the New World Group’s critique of capitalism.

In later years Girvan was despondent about the Group’s intellectual contributions. But this self-assessment is too harsh, I believe. The theory that they produced was a good precursor to 1990s analysis of globalization and 2010s analysis of enclave extractivism, thus validating the general tendency of capital to restructure societies in line with the imperatives of value in motion. While I endorse Girvan’s insights about the current provincialism in the Caribbean academy (it would be a mistake to provincialize Caribbean Studies because from the beginning it was always global^[88]) I otherwise find his pessimistic assessment unwarranted. In broad strokes, perhaps even to first approximation, it is correct. Granted, the Group needed to broaden its scope to include due attention to the global dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples. They also needed to acknowledge the role of gender in capitalism, with women as commodities and—through birthing—the main producers of capital. But I want to be clear: additions are not negations.

For the purposes of this essay, in addition to a rich archive of empirical social scientific studies on firms, industries, and the circulation of commodities in the Atlantic, the Group’s most important contribution was to provide a perspective on early capitalist development that differed from the accounts typically circulated in white metropolitan Marxist parties. It is for this reason that I fully endorse Brian Meek’s assessment that “New World still remains the most ambitious attempt to build a postcolonial, Pan Caribbean movement of radical intellectuals.”[89] Along these lines there is one related point worth making. As a broad tradition encumbered with a complex genealogy that shapes the structure of inquiry, Marxism nevertheless is perhaps the most perceptive critique of capitalist modernity. Within this tradition, the Group’s output stands as testament to help scholars better appreciate how the entrenched forces in metropoles and the lay assumptions that they generate can inadvertently creep into Marxist critique thereby sidelining work that is equally perceptive and comprehensive. This acknowledgement can perhaps make current critical practitioners less hubristic, recognising that the current fashion in the theorising might not represent the best theorising taking place today.

So to return to Girvan’s self-criticism, if he had cause to be critical of his compatriots in the Group, it would have been interesting to hear his critique of the historiographies in The New History of Capitalism. While this turn displays an array of new data, new methods, new techniques, and new concepts, it is still very much either mainstreaming or catching up to the insights that Black Radicals had in the first half of the 20^th century. Indeed, much of this turn comes without reference to the enslaved ways of life. As Walter Johnson writes, “uncannily, the most ambitious and perceptive examples of the “new history of capitalism” turn out to have been written over seventy years ago.”^[90] But inclusion of Black Radical insights means little if it amounts to simply inviting these insights into pre-existing and unchanged spaces. The proper barometer is whether those included have a say and resources to shape the structure of and relations in that space. And it is why the work of Group remains the benchmark that this turn still must meet. They accomplished far greater insight through a Black internationalist imagination fostered by movement and migration. So, while the scholars in this turn are being awarded tenure at Ivy League intuitions, it is important to remember that in his old age James languished in absolute poverty, starving in a room above the OWTU Building in South Trinidad.

Conclusion

Although members had different stances and intramural debates with Marxism more broadly, the New World Group—well known for offering interventions on what Stuart Hall called “the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture”^[91]—arguably sets the stage and agenda for much of the critical scholarship on capitalism, through for instance focusing attention to the role of Black labour in creating the value of billion-dollar digital corporations. Extending the range and utility of this line of critique is especially important when noticing how Black Radicals more broadly have been marginalized in the New History of Capitalism.^[92] In my estimation the Group has had one of the most comprehensive critiques of modernity, but due to the coloniality of knowledge and ‘white ignorance’ much of this has been insufficiently recognised. So altogether the Group have earned a place to weigh in on the current debates on race and class, and more. Indeed, through their emphasis on totality as well as in their social commitments, the Group presents a model of scholarship that very much stands adjacent to the ones practiced in the late 20^th early 21^st century academy, models that reward increased narrow disciplinary specialization all but ensuring that holistic revolutionary activism is thoroughly excommunicated.

During its decade of operation, the Group produced a considered conceptualization of how the West Indian plantation was the instrumentalization of human beings in service of capitalist forms of exploitation and expropriation; technical mechanisms coded distinctions while operative civic hierarchies working hand-in-hand with fiscal instruments to support the extraction of surplus value, with all of the above policed by a combination of public and private interests. Involving the spheres of circulation, conflicts, and constraints, black bodies were sites of financial experimentation. Throughout, plantations feature and foster racial discrimination, white supremacy, and massive exploitation, features that are all too common in our contemporary social relations. And indeed, the degree to which the vulgar nationalism version of the plantation society thesis had adherence and purchase in the Caribbean Girvan believed it was indicative of an isolated regional intellectual politics more concerned with performative claims than empirical demonstration.

Although capitalism has undergone tremendous change since the early 19^th century, there are also certain continuities that persist in the early 21^st century. The path determinacy of the commodities associated with the plantation still haunts distributions of privilege and abjection the world over. With respect to research and practice, scholars need to appreciate how this legacy (mis)shapes contemporary politics across the globe. One response to these conditions is to develop a politics centered on expanding the autonomy to ultimately ensure that subordination becomes a relic of the past. This cannot simply be about redistribution, recognition, or reparation. It calls forth an alternative kind of polity with new social relations that do not feature value struggle. As a prerequisite step, this means addressing powerlessness and establishing egalitarian demos that can steer an economy orientated towards priority and sufficiency. In Walter Rodney’s spirit, this line of analysis seeks to reinforce the conclusion that development is possible “only on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system.”^[93]

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Oxaal, Ivar 1968, Black Intellectuals Come to Power: The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing.

Patterson, Orlando 1970, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of The First Maroon War Jamaica, 1655 – 1740’, Social and Economic Studies, 19, 3: 289-325.

Patterson, Orlando 1982, Slavery and Social Death, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Paxton, Robert 2004, The Anatomy of Fascism, New York: Knopf.

Peach, G. C. K. 1967, ‘West Indians as a Replacement Population in England and Wales’, Social and Economic Studies, 16,3: 289-294.

Quinn, Kate (ed.) 2014, Black Power in the Caribbean, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Ramphal, S. S. 1962, ‘Fundamental Rights — The Need For A New Jurisprudence’, Caribbean Quarterly, 8, 3: 139-144.

Rey, Pierre-Philippe 1982, ‘Class Alliances’ (translation), International Journal of Sociology, 12,2: 1-120.

Robinson, Cedric 2000, Black Marxism, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press.

Rodney, Walter 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Nairobi and Washington, D.C.: East African Educational Publishers and Howard University Press.

Rodney, Walter, 1966, ‘Masses in Action’, New World Quarterly 2:3 (1966), 30-37, https://newworldjournal.org/africa/masses-in-action/

Rosenthal, Caitlin 2019, Accounting for Slavery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Ryan, Selwyn 2002, ‘Tapia and the Elections of 1976’, Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom, The Institute of Social and Economic Studies.

Streeck, Wolfgang 2019, ‘Through Unending Halls’, London Review of Books, 41,3:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n03/wolfgang-streeck/through-unendi….

Tidrick, Gene 1966, ‘Some Aspects of Jamaican Emigration to the United Kingdom 1953-1962’, Social and Economic Studies, 15,1: 22-39.

Waldstreicher, David 2009, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification, New York: Hill and Wang.

West, Cornel 1988, ‘Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition’, Monthly Review (September 1988).

Williams, Eric 1994, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Witter, Michael, nd, ‘On George Beckford: Brief Notes’, https://newworldjournal.org/independence/on-george-beckford-brief-notes/

Wolf, Eric 1982, Europe and The People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2002, ‘The Question of Market Dependence’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2,1: 50-87.

[1] Strictly, Thomas and Brewster would not include themselves in the Group, but their companionship, orbit and influence in heterodox Caribbean political economy warrants recognition.

[2] For Girvan, these tributaries included Marxist economists ranging from Paul Sweezy to Andre Gunder Frank, with supplementation by Caribbeanist anthropologists like Sidney Mintz’s ideas about a creolized oikouménē and American sociologists like Erving Goffman’s ideas about total institutions. Girvan 2006.

[3] As Girvan 2007 wrote, “The 1960s in the Anglophone Caribbean was a time of transition—psychological, no less than political. The old colonial order was in dying, but there was much debate over what would replace it.”

[4] On the general process see Marx 1859.

[5] Lindsay 1975.

[6] See Gray’s 1991 extraordinary study of radicalism and social change in Jamaica in the post-Independence era for an example of the kinds of national contests taking place in West Indian countries.

[7] Tapia’s main electoral planks were constitutional reform through devolution of power away from central government, the pursuit of full employment policies, and “a fully blown welfare state which would ensure cheap and adequate social services.” Ryan 2002, p. 47. The aim was to eliminate gross social inequalities.  

[8]Ryan, 2002, p. 55.

[9] Meeks 2001

[10] Meeks 2001

[11]Part of the journal’s archive can be found at https://newworldjournal.org/.

[12] See Brenner 2001, Wood 2002.

[13] Wood, 2002, p. 50.

[14] Rey 1982, Bois 1984.

[15] Anderson 2013, Anderson 1974.

[16] Streeck 2019.

[17] Rosenthal 2019.

[18] Also see Beniger 1986.

[19] Streeck 2019.

[20] Peach 1967. Also see Tidrick 1986

[21] Rodney, 1972, p. 199-200.

[22] Streeck 2019.

[23] Robinson 2000, p. 2.

[24] Robinson 2000 p. xxxi, p. 76. For more on Robinson’s critique of Marxism see Timcke 2022.

[25] Orlando Patterson defines enslavement as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” with Moses Finley adding that “The slave was himself a privately owned commodity, denied in perpetuity ownership of the means of production, denied control over his labour or the products of his labour and over his own reproduction.” Herein, a person’s reproduction depends entirely on the will of those that own the enslaved. Rife with ‘social death’ the discretion over life and death makes the system conducive to atrocities. Patterson 1982 13; Finley 2001 496.

[26] Robinson 2000, p. 166.

[27] I follow Sidney Mintz in including Du Bois as a contributor to the Caribbean archive. In addition to Haitian paternal linages, trips to the Antilles, like to Jamaica in 1915, helped cultivate a sense of what society could be “beyond the color line” Mintz, 2010, p. 3.

[28] Gilroy 1993, p. 1, p. ix.

[29] Acemoğlu and Robinson 2005; Acemoğlu and Robinson 2012.

[30] Planters distorted the voluntary limited contacts of servitude into a property relation, while Williams claims was accomplished because it accentuated prevailing European norms where “subordination was considered essential.” Williams 1994, p. 9.

[31] Williams 1994, p. 54-55. Douglas Hall provides comparable figures for Jamaica in 1790. See Hall 1962.

[32] See Hall 1961.

[33] Williams 1994, p. 98.

[34] Williams 1994, p. 98.

[35] Williams 1994, p. 1.

[36] For more details on some of these points see Patterson 1970.

[37] James 1989, p. 35.

[38] An example of the transnational movements of Big Whites as well as the politics between governors and planters, see Cudjoe 2018.

[39] This complicated politics is crisply encapsulated by James when he writes that, “The higher bureaucrats, cultivated Frenchmen, arrived in the island without prejudice; and looking for mass support used to help the Mulattoes a little. And Mulattoes and big whites had a common bond-property. Once the revolution was well under way the big whites would have to choose between their allies of race and their allies of property. They would not hesitate long.” James 1989, p. 44.

[40] James provides some background for this jockeying. He writes that “the Negro Code in 1685 authorized marriage between the white and the slave who had children by him, the ceremony freeing herself and her children. The Code gave the free Mulattoes and the free Negroes equal rights with the whites.” In the decades following the Negro Code, Mulattoes “were beginning to fill the colony, and their growing numbers and riches were causing alarm to the whites.” So Mulattoes were begrudgingly accepted to the extent that they could provide numbers to repress slave insurrections. James 1989, p. 36-37.

[41] James 1989, p. 100.

[42] James 1989, p. 35.

[43] Du Bois 2013, p. 3.

[44]Du Bois 2013, p. 3.

[45] Williams 1994, p. 23.

[46] James nd.

[47] Mills, 1998.

[48]Girvan nd.

[49]Girvan nd.

[50] Beckford, 1972.

[51] Beckford, 1972, p. 155-156, p. 37.

[52] Best 1992, p12, p 6.

[53] Best 1992, p. 233.

[54] Best and Levitt, 2009, p. 19.

[55] See Lewis, 1950; Lewis 1954.

[56] Best 1992, 11.

[57] Girvan 1973.

[58] Best 1992, p. 15.

[59] Girvan 1971, Girvan 1973.

[60] Editor’s Introduction 1967.

[61] Witter, nd.

[62]Writing in another context but to a similar debate, Cornel West asked, “to what extent are Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression?” West 1988, p. 51.

[63] See Maharaj-Bell, nd.

[64] While the New World Group did not have access to the full archive of Marx’s work, they very much anticipate some of Kevin Anderson’s conclusions, these being that Marxism was not wedded to a singular view of history nor periodization. The Group also followed Marx’s internationalism to find the anti-colonial analysis in this tradition thereby coming to reject the claims that Marxism was Eurocentric and unable to adequately account for race. Anderson 2010.

[65] See Beckford 1999, p. 259.

[66] Beckford 1999, p. 259.

[67] E.g., Charle 1966.

[68] Beckles 2013.

[69]E.g., Ramphal 1962. Beckles 2013 following in this spirit.

[70] Paxton 2004.

[71] Best 1967.

[72] See Oxaal 1968. Farler 1968.

[73] Rodney, 1966.

[74] Rodney 1972, p. 25.

[75] Rodney 1972, p. 206.

[76] Rodney 1972, p. 105, p. 107.

[77] Rodney 1972, p. 212.

[78] Rodney 1972, p. 279.

[79]Best, 2002, p. 63.

[80]Best 1967.

[81]Mills, 2010, p. 146.

[82] See Quinn, 2014 for context.

[83] Girvan, 2011.

[84] Girvan, 2011

[85]Meeks, 2014, p. viii.

[86]Meeks, 2001, p. xiv.

[87] See Maharaj-Bell, nd; also Meeks 2001.

[88] Wolf 1982. Gomes and Timcke 2021.

[89] Meeks, nd.

[90] Johnson 2018.

[91] Hall 1989, p. 151.

[92] For a critique of how some of these scholars in this turn have overlooked Black Radicals see Hudson 2016.

[93] Rodney 1972, p. ix.

This paper asks how whether and how caste fits into a global history of racial capitalism? The misidentification of caste as custom has long misled analysts and thwarted solidarities. Drawing on the insights of two important literatures, this paper seeks to remedy that misdiagnosis and show that 1) caste abolition must be central to any effective anti-capitalist politics in South Asia, 2) a focus on ‘local’ systems of racialization like caste is necessary in any history of global racial capitalism. The two literatures I engaged with to achieve these aims are: scholarship on racial capitalism and scholarship on the Indian transition to capitalism. The result is an expanding of the geography of racial capitalism and the centering of caste-based unfreedoms as central to the history of capitalism in the Indian subcontinent. 

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

In 2001 at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, anti-caste and Dalit activists argued that caste should be understood like race, with dehumanizing violence and discrimination holding both systems up.[1] The Indian government countered that the caste problem should not be internationalized since caste was India’s unique cultural problem.^[2] The contention that caste was a unique cultural feature of India and therefore unlike race served to protect casteism from international censure.

Safeguarding casteism by calling it a protected religious right was a tactic as old as at least colonial rule. In The Pariah Problem, the historian Rupa Viswanath has uncovered how in the 1890s colonial officials and missionaries sought to investigate what they referred to as “Indian slavery,” upper-caste landholders insisted that caste was not comparable to Atlantic slavery because it was a religiously sanctioned and therefore a gentler form of servitude which was mutually beneficial to upper and lower castes. Given that interference in native religion had already proven detrimental to colonial legitimacy during the 1857 uprising, rendering caste “religious” allowed landlords successfully to escape scrutiny and retain their hold on cheap labor. Caste was thus rendered religious, customary, and traditional not by transhistorical religious texts but because of the specific way religion was mobilized by upper caste elites and landholders.

In internationalizing caste in 2001, anti-caste and Dalit activists disrupted this manufactured separation between caste and race and tried to find common cause with African slaves of the new world, an effort that anti-caste thinkers had been making for a long time. Since the late 19^th century, Ambedkar and Dalit workers looked to the American experience to understand their own situation as once-enslaved people. Subaltern actors – bonded laborers, low caste, untouchable or Dalit workers – invoked the American struggle with slavery as a resource for their own struggles.[3] Decolonization for these actors meant much more than the removal of “foreign rule”: it meant attending to the local structures of power and accumulation that subjugated them.

The misidentification of caste as custom has long misled analysts and thwarted solidarities. Studies of caste that do not engage class, political-economy, or the fact of the need for capital accumulation projects from land, labor, money, most often re-affirm the irrationality or arbitrariness of caste/casteism. Such studies do not help us understand the specific material basis of caste nor help us ally with concrete solutions that come from anti-caste actors on the ground, many of whom embraced both anti-caste and anti-capital ideologies simultaneously.[4]Drawing on the insights of two important literatures, this paper seeks to remedy that misdiagnosis and show that 1) caste abolition must be central to any effective anti-capitalist politics in South Asia, 2) a focus on ‘local’ systems of racialization like caste is necessary in any history of global racial capitalism. The two literatures I engaged with to achieve these aims are: scholarship on racial capitalism and scholarship on the Indian transition to capitalism. The result is an expanding of the geography of racial capitalism and the centering of caste-based unfreedoms as central to the history of capitalism in the Indian subcontinent.

In the former body of work, Black Marxist scholars like W.E.B. DuBois and Cedric Robinson have challenged conventional Marxist accounts of capitalist accumulation by showing the centrality of racialization and unfree labor in the operations of capitalism, which is too often understood as a domain of impersonal exchange and free labor. Drawing on the work of Black Marxists, I argue that the durability of caste—as a form of racialized unfreedom—is a feature of capitalism, not a bug, because capitalism relies on both free and unfree, impersonal and racialized labor. Caste, then, is not evidence of capitalism’s non-arrival or underdeveloped state because of colonial rule but rather itself a logic of racialization within capitalism. This implies that caste-oppressed workers must be part of any anticapitalist movement that seeks to win.  

The second literature this paper draw on is scholarship on South Asia’s transition to capitalism. Black Marxists’ work holds important insights but falls short in assuming that racial capitalism emerged in Europe and emanated outward from there. Looking at scholarship on South Asian ‘origins’ of capitalism, however, makes it clear that racial capitalism developed at multiple ‘origin’ points, only later subsumed within a European colonial frame. This makes it possible to understand race and caste as like-structures of economic and social domination, and lay the foundations for a truly internationalist movement against racial capitalism.

This paper is organized in the following manner. The first section establishes the basis of my argument by reviewing recent scholarship that has challenged the notion that caste is a traditional or religious system. The second section lays out the implications of studies of global racial capitalism for understanding caste, with a particular focus on the work of W.E.B. DuBois and Cedric Robinson. The third section uses scholarship on South Asia’s colonial transition to ‘globalize’ understandings of caste, positioning it in the same history of capitalism as race so as to make true internationalism imaginable. The final section concludes by sketching the implications of this paper’s argument for anti-capitalist movements both within India and around the world. What emerges is the need to see the Indian subcontinent’s history as one that is shot through with a fundamental antagonism between capital and unfree labor. Indeed, it is the distinction between peoples rather than distinction between places gives capital its power, everywhere.

Caste and Capitalism

As mentioned above, the mode of understanding caste as traditional and customary is a view that aligns with dominant caste interests. It is also the prevalent way of thinking about caste within the academy,[5] both in India and in the United States. (The caste-status of most academics might have something to do with this.) The anthropologist David Mosse has called this obfuscating scholarly framing an “enclosure” around caste: “the scholarly framing of caste mirrors a public-policy ‘enclosure’ of caste in the non-modern realm of religion and ‘caste politics’, while aligning modernity to the caste-erasing market economy.”[6] In this vein, far too many economic historians of India have blamed the prevalence of caste on India’s failure to progress through capitalism towards a sanitized version of modernity. Scholars have frequently confused caste’s longevity with a proof that it is rooted in tradition.

However, the longevity of caste has not to do with its moorings in tradition, but the powerful counterrevolutionary forces that have foiled caste emancipation again and again.[7] It is much more revealing to see the way caste is entangled with capitalism just as the way race is entangled with capitalism. Arguing to conceptualize caste in this way is not meant to create an analogy nor argue that race and caste are the same. Rather, it is meant to embed caste identity and caste-ism into the historical and material processes of accumulation.[8]

One of the earliest studies that questioned the narrative that colonialism had caused India to undergo a failed transition to capitalist modernity was that of the economic historian Dharma Kumar. In her 1965 publication, Land and Caste, Kumar showed that the creation of a large class of landless laborers was not the effect of colonialism as scholars had thus far contended, but a condition older than colonialism and one that mapped on to caste.[9] This was a profound challenge to conventions of colonial historiography, and Kumar’s insights became a truth mostly buried amongst subsequent histories.

It wasn’t until the 2014 book, The Pariah Problem, that Rupa Viswanath showed that land rights amongstmirasidars included land plus “all the natural resources” including the Pariahs on the land. In other words, rights over land and rights over hereditarily unfree laborers were one and the same; Pariahs were essentially property. Viswanath’s work deftly built upon but moved into a new frame what Dharma Kumar had recognized decades earlier. Kumar had  relegated the casteist-nature of peasantization to the realm of “social explanation” rather than economic, but Viswanath accomplished much by refusing to separate the social from the economic. Viswanath’s work demonstrated exactly why and how landless laborers preceded the process of peasantization and deindustrialization that most historians assumed characterized colonialism. Viswanath showed how appealing to caste as a religious right helped upper caste landholders avoid the consequences of juridical abolition that had materialized across the British Empire, explaining exactly why the poverty and precarity of landless laborers in India has been such a durable form of inequality.[10] Untouchable status, imbricated in both custom and contract all at once and therefore caste and class all at once, gave caste-based poverty its durability.

Caste rendered inequality durable in urban India as well. By the inter-war period, colonial liberal governance claimed to have empowered new Dalit publics to raise the “caste question,” but as Anupama Rao has shown, segregation in housing, education, public goods, and so on, was never overcome by a regime of liberal, anonymous, individuated property rights. Rather than a capitalist regime of property extinguishing caste, the “custom” of caste inflected property itself. As Rao incisively puts it: “In [an] incremental alignment of custom with the contract-inflected regimes of private property, a new foundation for segregation was produced.” [italics mine] Rao’s insights here challenge the notion that an extension of capitalist private property regimes overcomes caste, instead showing caste as constitutive of capitalist modernity.[11]

What we learn from these critical historians of caste and capitalism is that the history of caste is complicated but also kind of simple. Colonialism didn’t invent it, nor was it an aberration of a longer history of benign Hindu practice, nor was it limited to Hindu or even Indian communities.[12] Instead, caste has long been useful in the organization of materially hierarchical society before, throughout, and after colonialism. Certainly, more regional histories are required to rigorously analyse the local specificities of caste and capitalism’s entanglements. Nonetheless, the continuity of caste-based enslavement in the subcontinent is probably the most remarkable structural feature of capitalist modernity in the region.[13]

Once we start looking in this way, we see that caste-slavery, debt-bondage, and discriminatory spectral violence are not phenomenon so categorically distinct from the global trajectory of race-based oppression.[14] It is imperative to see the Indian subcontinent’s history as one that is shot through with a fundamental antagonism between the power of capital and unfree labor, an antagonism that is maintained by recourse to caste as an organizing feature of a deeply unequal society.

Caste & Black Marxism

1. An Anti-Progressive History

One of the reasons it is profoundly difficult to see something like caste as a constitutive part of capitalist modernity is the very narrow way in which capitalism is understood in the first place. Dominant Marxist understandings of the history and process of capitalism are diffusionist and progressive. In such a story, places and peoples with unfree or “insufficiently proletarianized” labor are narrated as the “outside” of capitalism proper, which is located solidly in places where wage labor prevails. Such views come from Marx’s own understanding of slavery as “primitive accumulation,” and his accounts of industrialization as a progressive force towards world historical transformation.[15] Diffusionist views play a role in developmentalist paradigms, where peoples and places come to be seen as outside of “the economy” proper waiting to be brought in by modernization and technology. We can call this dominant view the “progressive” view of capitalism whereby capitalist relations lead to progress towards capitalism’s own undoing. It was in response to this progressivist view that Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism offered an anti-progressive view of capitalism.Black Marxism was exemplary but not alone in its criticisms of traditional progressive Marxism.

Published in 1983, Black Marxism was written against what Robinson himself called “the tradition” of Marxism that included Marx, Engels, and Lenin, despite the disagreements between them.[16] In Black Marxism Robinson reframed the history of capitalism as something quite different from Marx’s account.

While there were numerous insights in Black Marxism, one is particularly salient for understanding Robinson’s anti-progressive understanding of capitalism. Robinson argues that, contra Marx, “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.”[17] He argued that even within Europe, capitalist productive relations grew inside social relations that were precapitalist, racial, and feudal. Thus, the advent of capitalism did not overcome feudal social formations so much as extend them. Colonial processes of racializing and enslaving Africans in the sixteenth century were thus an extension of racial hierarchiesinternal to Europe, with Africans replacing the Irish and the Germanic peoples in the position of the enslaved.

One of Robinson’s key anti-progressive arguments is that not only is racialism a key component of capitalism, but so are the seemingly “feudal” labor regimes of slavery, informal labor, day labor, and bondage. Together, these form racialized capitalism, not because places or peoples were excluded from the full effects of a capitalist transition but because regimes of unfree and free labor working in tandem were natural to the system. Poverty, precarity, and informality was the correct outcome of racial capitalism because it was not a progressive force. If these things were accepted to be true, then one had to accept that the history of capitalism was not simply the march towards juridical freedom that mystified economic unfreedom, as Marx had argued, but the reinvigoration and wholesale creation of unfreedom itself.

2. A New Revolutionary Subject

Robinson’s work was a profound rewriting of Marxist histories of both capitalism and industrialism. He showed that because it was embedded in racialized and feudal relations, “the Industrial Revolution…was never quite the phenomenon it has become in the hands of some of its historians and in the popular mind.”[18] As he explains, “the appearance of industrial production was [not] revolutionary (in the sense of a sudden, catastrophic change).” By the eighteenth century, the power of industry developed in an already racial context and did not eradicate forms of enslavement and bondage. Instead, industrial capitalism was born as one component part within racialism’s long and dynamic history. As such, it did not produce a particularly revolutionary proletariat. Instead, workers maintained their cultural, national, and racial identities and capitalized on those to find a footing in new pyramids of production.

This might be Robinson’s most significant interruption of Marxist histories. Understanding capitalism as always already racial is not simply an academic exercise for Robinson. Instead, it allows him to reconceptualize the anti-capitalist revolutionary subject. In traditional accounts, the (European) male factory worker was a privileged counter to the power of capital and became the principal subject of revolution. This was not simply a theoretical position but much organizing and labor activism poured its energy into the factory floor to the exclusion of other workplaces throughout the 20^th century. Robinson challenged this at the outset, noting in his introduction that the industrial working classes of Europe never replaced their racial and national identity with their class identity. As such there was no way the industrial working classes could be a world historical force. In the preface to the 2000 edition ofBlack Marxism, Robinson began with a quote from Oliver Cromwell Cox: “The workers in the advanced nations have done all they could, or intended, to do—which was always something short of revolution.”[19]

For Robinson, the political counter to capitalism could not solely be the industrial proletariat. History showed otherwise. Reviewing the Indian mutiny of 1857 and the Boxer Rebellion, and other struggles against imperialism, Robinson underscored the importance of nationalist rebellions: “And in every instance, peasants and agrarian workers had been the primary social bases of rebellion and revolution. Nowhere, not even in Russia, where a rebellious urban proletariat was a fraction of the mobilized working classes, had a bourgeois social order formed a precondition for revolutionary struggle… The idiom of revolutionary consciousness had been historical and cultural rather than the “mirror of production.”[20] He argued that revolts by slaves who, even if temporarily, fled slavery, or slaves who foiled their oppressors and masters in other ways offered a political template with which to challenge racial capitalism. Such rebellions revealed the astute political understandings of those enslaved by a system that depended on their racialized and unfree labor.

Robinson was not alone in trying to reconceptualize the revolutionary subject who could overthrow capitalism. In the 1980s and 90s, many scholars in colonial studies, feminist studies, and studies of race and slavery challenged the valorization of the factory worker as the exclusive container of revolutionary struggle. Feminist Marxists, for instance, have shown how gendered, racialized, domesticated and unfree labor is in fact that on which capitalist development depends. Thus, gendered unfree labor not only survives the capitalist transition but thrives under it. Sylvia Federici has shown how the very creation of the industrial proletariat required a war on and against women. She showed that under capitalism, housework underwent “real” rather than “formal” subsumption, becoming central to capitalist accumulation even as it remained outside the wage.[21] By placing Robinson within this milieu of critique we can understand more clearly the limitations of Marxism in the traditional sense and how Robinson intervened interventions against the progressive story of capitalist development. Robinson and other scholars challenged the many myths of capitalism, including the notion that markets & capitalism are blind to race, gender, and nationality. The political counter to racial capitalism was not simply wage labor’s industrial strikes, but resistances of other kinds even from juridically unfree or domesticated laborers.

3. Applying Black Marxists’ Insights to Caste

South Asianists’, postcolonialists’ and nationalists’ understandings of colonial racialism have only entered our study of colonial rule as that which installs a Manichean line as Fanon called it,^[22] between the colonizer and the colonized. Rather than understand caste-ism as an older form of racialism inside of which the power of capital grew such that unfreedom and poverty were the inevitable outcome, caste is separated from the economy, imagined as a religious system that serves only to justify a distinctly colonial capitalism that underdeveloped India. That unfree forms of bondage and labor remain in South Asia is explained as simply because the subcontinent’s capitalist transition had been thwarted and that we failed to form a national bourgeoisie who could revolutionize the mode of production.

Robinson provided an account of the durability of unfreedom, the limited effects of industrialization even in England, and most especially the very exclusions on which England’s own story of revolutionary transition depended.^[23] In Robinson’s analysis, Marx was not Eurocentric, rather he had made a more fundamental error. Marx had extrapolated from a very narrow experience even in England and used it to define in advance, even predict, what constituted true political engagement.^[24] In contrast to this valorization of the revolutionary potential and promises of industrial labor, Robinson challenged it. The long history of factory labor’s compromises with capital, often on the backs of racialized and unfree labor, were best understood by understanding capitalism as racialized not just in its onset but even in the way it solved its crises.

“Racial capitalism” demands we investigate how racialization serves capitalist accumulation either by managing labor by disorganizing movements against capital or by creating networks of affiliation that motor newer and newer projects of expansion and accumulation. As such, race and racism, rather than rendered transhistorical or manifestations of group-based enmity, are historicized by connecting specific political economic conjunctures and the specific processes of racialization they depend on and produce to antagonisms between labor and capital. This process of racialization pertains to “cultures” or locations wherever the power of capital must revitalize itself in the face of its demise. By extension to the Indian case, we can identify caste and casteism as important component parts of capitalism’s processual nature. This caste-capitalism is a process prone to crisis and re-consolidation by the use of caste to solve capitalism’s problems.

In India for instance, as Stephen Sherlock shows, this progressivist version of Marxism came from Moscow and dominated communist parties who eventually amalgamated nationalism to working class demands. Sherlock shows that “In the colonies such as India this meant that the communists should all but dissolve themselves into the nationalist movement, regardless of its class character or anti-imperialist potential.”[25] The dangers of abandoning the class character of anti-colonial nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s are probably obvious, but especially damaging was the long term effect this had on the survival of the Left in postcolonial India where left organizers focused on organizing a declining mill-hand and industrial workforce rather than the growing sector of informal workers. In postcolonial India, a focus on the declining industrial workforce meant that the growing informal sector provided a constant reserve army of labor that prevented any limits on capitalist power. What’s worse, the “Left in India has most of its life striven to appear more nationalist than the nationalists.” This was and is so true, that, again as Sherlock notes, “Marxism became one of the tools of the Indian state in its developmental project.”[26] Indeed this diffusionist model of capitalism had a lot of power even amongst anti-capitalists. Placing the history and theory of racial capitalism against it was and is a powerful move with both theoretical implications as well as implications for praxis.

Caste & the Transition Debates

In W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 text Black Reconstruction in America, DuBois observed that the legal abolition of slavery in 1865 didn’t end slavery. Rather, abolition began the movement of capital from “white to black countries where slavery prevailed.” In providing such an analysis, Dubois connected the downward mobility of the white farmer, the freed Black laborer, laborers across South America, Africa and Asia in a common system where agriculture, industry, and property worked in tandem to generate profits for the few. However, despite this astutely internationalist understanding of racial capitalism,it was unfortunate that in Dubois’ otherwise powerful story, “Asia,” “Africa” and “South America” appeared as undifferentiated masses, lands providing a geographic container or backyard for the northern capitalist’s greed. Rather than staging a longer history of racialized class conflict of their own, places named Asia, Africa, and South America entered history on an American timeline. Moreover, despite understanding the common system connecting free and unfree laborers, Dubois continued to see the non-Western world as a locus of unique, primitive forms of unfreedom. At one point, Dubois expressed his frustration at the degradation of the Black worker’s power in the US South by saying, “caste has been revived in a modern civilized land. It was supposed to be a relic of barbarism and existent only in Asia. But it has grown up and has been carefully nurtured and put on a legal basis with religious and moral sanctions in the South.”^[27]The social system of “caste” appears here as a relic of the past and of “barbarism,” a system of unmoving status endorsed by tradition or custom rather than itself a system contingent upon particular political economic conditions and accumulation projects that had ever narrowing or widening geographic scales. It was thus difficult to conceive of caste as modern or Asia as having its own history of racial capitalist development.

Like Dubois, racial capitalism within the non-West remained a blind spot for Robinson. He provided a history of capitalism that was rather Eurocentric. In the introduction to Black Marxism, Robinson wrote, “Though hardly unique to European peoples, its appearance and codification, during the feudal period, into Western conceptions of society was to have important and enduring consequences.”[28] So even as he acknowledges that the history of racialism in which capitalism grew could occur in other societies, he himself focused on Europe alone. Robinson’s history of capitalism depended heavily on the work of Henri Pirenne, a Europeanist who believed so strongly in European exceptionalism that he placed medieval Europe singularly on a path to capitalist development – because of its invention of double entry bookkeeping ­– from centuries long before “capitalism” was even conceivable.[29] In following Pirenne, Robinson didn’t engage with the scholarship contesting this Eurocentric origin story of capitalism.

Not only DuBois or Cedric Robinson but numerous thinkers who depend on them have failed to challenge the Eurocentrism of Robinson (or American centrism of DuBois). To overcome these latent Eurocentrisms in the work of Black Marxists, we need to build upon Robinson’s own anti-progressive history of capitalism and expand racial capitalism’s geography to unmoor it from European soil. We need to ask what would a global history of racial capitalism look like that was neither Eurocentric nor so diffuse that it had no meaning? And what kind of internationalism would it allow us to think and imagine differently? Pointing to those mistakes also allows us to counter a dominant Eurocentric history of racial capitalism that has long held dangerous implications for internationalism. is it possible that what is called “racial capitalism” in North Atlantic modernity is a more geographically widespread process, a process that neither originates in a single location — not in Europe or the North Atlantic as is widely assumed — nor develops the same way everywhere?^[30] Finally and relatedly, what is gained by expanding the geography of racial capitalism? But what would happen if we combined the insights of, for instance, Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient with Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism? In other words, what would happen if we extended Robinson’s insights into the “old world” and spaces of purported underdevelopment to show how even extra-European early modern commercial societies were structured on “internal” and external racialisms inside of which colonial capitalism grew?

Challenging the Eurocentric origins of capitalism had a bit of a career especially in the scholarship that challenged Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory and the transition debates that valorized English agricultural development.[31] When Wallerstein placed Europe at the center of the world economy already by the 1600s, South Asianists challenged Wallerstein’s Eurocentric temporality.[32] After the 1990s, much scholarship on South Asia, especially that produced in the United States, abandoned class-based analysis by dismissing “capitalism” as a western analytic construct that distorted more than it revealed. Thus, interest in the question of capitalism’s origins, capitalist transitions, and the role of colonial India in economic history waned. Barring a few important exceptions, it wasn’t until 2008’s financial crisis that a renewed interest in the history of capitalism in America brought along a similarly renewed interest in such histories of the subcontinent.

Before that dismissal, vibrant debates about the subcontinent’s history of capitalism took place. Much of this could be broadly characterized as debates over continuity and change with regards to European colonial power. In other words, what was new and what was old about European colonialism? Did European colonialism cause an irreversible break with the subcontinent’s past or were their older forms of power into which European power was grafted? Rather than rehearsing those debates here, I can instead point to some important summaries and state that at best these debates are best understood as abandoned and not solved, a feature that can be gleaned by reading Dipesh Chakrabarty’s posthumous concession to Chris Bayly upon Bayly’s passing.^[33] A recent essay by Andy Liu in the Journal of Asian Studies does an excellent job connecting those older debates to contemporary forces of de-industrialization in the 1980s, signaling a shift from a Marxist story of production to an at least nominal Smithian story of commercialization.^[34] Doing so, Liu asks scholars to more clearly integrate commercialization and production based stories of capitalism, rather than see them as linearly opposed. Such would enable the possibility of writing histories of capitalism firmly situated in China and India, amongst other places.

An important challenge to a Eurocentric history on the origins of capitalism emerged in those transition debates. Historians of South Asia provided accounts of continuity that were and sometimes still are about how “our” commercial classes were on par with or commensurable to Europe’s commercial classes up until the onset of colonialism. This parity was only to be thwarted and foiled by colonial exclusions later. But in the decades prior to the eighteenth century, the Indian subcontinent had ingenious merchants who crisscrossed overland trade and oceanic routes as cosmopolitan and rational economic actors.[35] The rule of property that institutionalized in the 19th century was a final outcome of long and gradual changes that entailed centuries of intensifying commercialization.^[36] Thus it wasn’t until 1800 or even 1850 that India and Europe truly diverged, in other words this continuity thesis pushed the moment of divergence forward in time.^[37] Until that moment, the subcontinent had potentialities to capitalism, or at the least, we could safely argue against Wallerstein that commercial capitalism did not originate in Europe in the 16th century and then incorporate India,^[38] but rather had diverse local contexts of origin. As Frank Perlin, an advocate of the “proto-industrialization thesis,” once put it, “…events within India need to be recast as an inseparable part of an international forum of activities.”^[39]

This idea of multiple origins was important for decentering Europe and challenging scholars like Henri Pirenne. What our version of commensurability followed by dependency accomplished was that it firmly placed the power of at least commercial capital on Indian soil, not as an imposition from outside that radically disrupted our history. Yet scholars often conceded that while there might have been capitalist potential in the subcontinent prior to European rule in the 19th century, such potential was thwarted by the colonial encounter. A version of the “dependency” thesis, in colonial India, the economy supplied the raw materials for industrial output in England and as such it was forced into a prior stage of development.[40] Peasantization and de-urbanization were the outcomes of colonial rule, as evidenced by the poverty and dependence on agriculture that the majority of Indians inherited. If India had industrialization, it was in select enclaves, the economy as a whole was not characterized by it.

Rethinking commercial capitalism in the “old world” or the colonial world was also important to countering Henri Pirenne. Jairus Banaji’s scholarship over the years has done this most forcefully, showing the expansion and generalization of the formal subsumption of labor, the persistence of commercial capitalism, and the power of merchant capital to dominate production relations rather than simply being a commercial transfer. Analyzing capitalist development from the colonies and in the Deccan countryside brought up a different set of problems and solutions. What was the history of capitalism if not the generalization of wage labor and industry? A powerful and much read essay by Banaji argued that indebtedness amongst the peasantry in colonial India was not a remnant of a prior mode of production but persisted through colonial commercial capitalism. Debt was paid in advance of a season of production and so this debt functioned as a wage.^[41] In doing so, Banaji modernized our understanding of debt bondage and showed how it was central to colonial commercial capitalism.

In a more recent work, Banaji argues that what is considered commercial capitalism as an era prior to industrial capitalism persisted much further in time than Marx thought, closer to between 1880-1914. What’s more, merchant capital certainly dominated over production relations.[42] As such, attention to this commercial capitalism could reveal the plurality of capitalist relations of production. Banaji has elsewhere stated, “Capitalism is characterised by the drive to accumulate capital regardless of the specific form in which labour is dominated and surplus-labour extracted. To the individual capitalist it makes no difference whether the worker is free or unfree, works at home or in a factory, and so on. Those decisions are purely economic and technical; they relate to issues like costs of production, availability of labour, and whether a certain kind of worker (female, home-based) is more suitable for a certain kind of production. At this level (individual capital) even the construction of ‘skill’ is a highly subjective matter.”[43]

Yet the accomplishments of these arguments had a very important limitation. Such accounts made the same mistake Robinson accused Marx of making, namely ignoring the political capacities of all the informal and unfree labor that continued or was even created alongside the industrial transitions. Most importantly, neither such Marxist scholars of colonial India nor Marxist labor organizers on the ground drew out the political potential of anyone but the industrial working classes.[44] This was because challenging periodization or the exclusion of other kinds of labor besides wage-labor did not radically alter Marxian understandings of the history of capitalism, it simply added to Marx without challenging the fundamentally progressive qualities Marx attributed to industrial capitalism. At worse, ambiguity was maintained on whether anti-capitalist organization was even possible in colonial societies so long under the rule of commercial capitalism.

But we neither have to carve out Indian factories from their social mileu to prove that India had capitalism too nor must we find commercial men in the Indian Ocean to be equivalent counterparts to commercial agents working for European trading companies. Rather the structural continuities of labor exploitation, both free and unfree, continuities that traverse city and country, factory and plantation, and the wage and debt, are central components of capitalist logics, and they can be commercial, industrial, and slave-based.

In many ways Robinson’s argument in Black Marxism should have been the continuity thesis South Asia’s historians looked for. A theory of racial capitalism would have demanded that we recognize the necessary and causal link between the casualization of labor, deindustrialization, rising debt bondage, and the power of capital, everywhere. As a historical theory and method, this was not a question of connecting class and caste, but rather asking how they had come to be seen as distinct. We should have been answering the question so well-posed by Walter Johnson: By which historical processes had the “boundaries between slavery and freedom been drawn?”^[45] While the impulse to demonstrate the persistence of commercial capitalism has created welcome historiographical insights on the role of the colonies in world capitalism writ large, it has been limited in its ability to engage the question of politics, of how specifically racialization is a political maneuver meant to both keep accumulation projects going and a potential force of its undoing.

Conclusion: On Internationalism

Once we accept the profound implications of Cedric Robinson’s disruptions of the myths of capitalist development, some of which even Marxists had bought into, we can start to see why caste is not an atavistic relic but rather institutionalized in caste-capitalism. By endowing political potential in a non-factory class and overcoming the progressive model of history, Robinson not only provided a historical retelling but atheoretical account of the history of the modern world, not one that added to or was deviant from the theory of capital created by Marx but one that ought to replace it. As such it wasn’t an “economic history” that bracketed off questions of politics but treated the political-economic as a single field of actions of exploitation and dispossession against which some rebelled.

Yet, his story of racial capitalism has a history not captured by a Eurocentric frame. Robinson was right that the history of capitalism necessarily and always entailed enslavement and unfreedom, but he was wrong that such a system originated singularly in Europe. Instead, racial capitalism has multiple origins and its geographic and uneven development cannot be understood by “west versus rest” paradigms. What we learn by extending racial capitalism’s history is that most places in the world have longer capital-labor relations that are themselves racialized and do not progress towards industrialization. These facts help us overcome many of the teleological anticipations of “development,” “modernization,” and even “globalization” that are offered up as anti-colonial. To overcome racial capitalism, a “Black Marxism” must inform internationalist projects in ways that don’t reify industrial labor to the expense of other forms of labor, but must also inform internationalist projects in ways that don’t simply ask for the removal of “foreign meddling” in domestic affairs such that Asian capitalists and developers, whether at the helm of native industries or heads of state, are propped up as the vanguard of Asian postcolonial liberation.

The story of Black Marxism, in spite of slave rebellions against the system of racial capitalism, is still one of unfreedom to unfreedom. Black Marxism was not a simple celebration of the power of revolt, counter-movements of property and labor exploitation found newer and newer tactics of control. Robinson said,

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression—a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.[46]

This skillful terracing depended on ideological, “cultural” and local regimes of meaning-making that could justify and enshrine inequality as natural to certain peoples and places. This was the tactic of racial capitalism both in the United States and in India. If we take Robinson’s work to heart, we find the world we live in today is much more “feudal” than often recognized with coercive, non-economic, and filial-based networks driving production and extraction.

DuBois engagement with Indian politics and history was more sustained than the reading of Black Reconstruction that this paper opened with. Yet, producing the true internationalist political that was necessary to counter the fact that freedom anywhere negated freedom everywhere couldn’t exactly be found in DuBois other work. While India figured prominently in DuBois thinking on anti-colonial resistance as exemplary of the struggles of African Americans in the United States, India remained an ahistorical trope rather than a concrete reality with a history and politics of its own.

DuBois corresponded with Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai, watched Gandhian agitations closely, and thought India showed a path forward. It was probably these views that led him to author the novel Dark Princess in 1928, a story of love and resistance. But scholars have questionedDark Princess not only for its patriarchal and heteronormative positioning of colonized peoples as feminine, but also for its ahistorical understanding of India. Dohra Ahmad’s book,Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America notes the contrast of how realistic DuBois’ depictions of Chicago were in contrast to the almost fantastical princely figures that served as metonyms of Indian life. In fact, as Ahmad notes, the fantastical places inDark Princess “staunchly and notoriously collaborationist” not anti-colonial. Ahmad further warns, “The romance of India, its ahistoricity, and the inconsistent analogy between colonized India and black America all demand that we approach the idea of a global South with caution.”[47]

Indeed, DuBois’ positioning of figures of old-world authority as exemplary of colored peoples’ pre-capitalist sovereignty was of a kind with some of the understandings of pre-colonial African history that are mobilized to challenge colonialism. A sustained focus on caste-based violence as class-based violence and exploitation within a longer history of what would become colonized lands has not yet been undertaken.[48] Doing such a project would require us to ask how caste and accumulation projects served one another from the 1400s onwards without starting with the assumption that Europe was already at the center of the world. It would require us to take Gunder Frank’s ReOrient much more seriously and yet move beyond it to criticize the labor exploitation practices on which Asian centrality in the pre-European economy was based.

Placing coercive labor at the center of capitalist dynamics allows us to “stretch Marxism” without falling into a new universalism. It allows us to make sense of India’s regionally specific forms of capitalist class power. Doing so should caution us against decolonization or national liberation projects that depend on more traditional Indian marxists as allies against colonial and neocolonial rule, and caution us against overlooking the concrete particulars of India’s class dynamics, coercive labor regimes, and the racialization that manifests as caste and religion. Racism is always about labor discipline; informal, precarious, gig, "traditional," feminized, etc. is the main form of labor everywhere, not a sign of economic stagnation or an incompleteness of the capitalist transition. The power of caste-capitalism has certainly continued into the present where the ongoing racialization of labor creates what Malini Ranganathan calls “environmental unfreedoms” that render life precarious all over again as housing evictions and ecological scarcity threaten urban communities.[49]

A fundamental insight of racial capitalism is that it is difference between peoples and not difference between places that keeps racial capitalism going, development discourse fails to recognize this.What would it take to build an internationalism that recognized the importance of class stratification everywhere? Unfreedom is metaphorically like a force of gravity, it pulls the power of all labor everywhere down. But this force of gravity functions in historically materialist ways; as long as there is cheaper unfree labor somewhere, easier to discipline and exploit, the power of labor everywhere to resist exploitation is reduced. To see this play out one doesn’t even need to oppose “first world” to “third,” one can see this in the way in which cheap prison labor in the United States has undermined the power of labor on “the outside.”[50] This is the point of Du Bois quote in the beginning, that unfreedom anywhere threatens freedom everywhere. As a problem it is always already an international problem. What would the implications be of analyzing unfreedom as a connected phenomenon across the old world and new? How can we understand both race and caste identity as outcomes of a single imperial dynamic relation between labor and capital?

By the 20th century, if not earlier, there are some remarkable parallels between how caste and how race function. One parallel is the way the question of whether there can be an anti-racist politics without anti-capitalism serves to clarify political struggles against race and caste. The answer to this question has formed an important line between liberal anti-racists and Black Marxists and allies; it informs the debates over reparations and the emancipatory role imagined for property.[51] About caste, we can ask can caste be annihilated, as Ambedkar asked for, without confronting capitalism? On the one had is demands for inclusion into the spoils of production, be it national wealth or private enterprise, and on the other is the radical dismantling of that production process itself. In postcolonial India, especially since the 1980s, inclusion in representation has more prominently replaced radical challenges to caste-capitalism.[52] We know, however, that there were Dalit Communists like R.B. More who gave the communist party whatever anti-caste leanings it had. But More was also constantly negotiating both the casteism of communist party members, many whom were upper caste, and their conception that caste was atavistic and therefore irrelevant to class struggle.^[53] This problem has been most beautifully rendered in Sujata Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, where Untouchables struggle to find a place in India’s burgeoning Communist movement, at times challenging and at times accepting the movement’s caste-blindness.^[54]

Even the spectacular violence against Dalits has parallels to anti-black violence, rooted as they both are in retaliation against successful efforts towards emancipation. Anand Teltumbde has shown how casteist violence against Dalits is often retaliation against successful Dalit upliftment, as such it is rooted in specific conjunctures of political economy beginning in the 1970s when low-castes were pitted against untouchables for reserved positions — a dynamic similar to that between poor whites and Blacks in the United States. Teltumbde is currently jailed on state charges of anti-nationalism and has not received the attention he should in South Asian and postcolonial studies curricula. Teltumbde has shown in much of his work that upper caste bureaucrats, intellectuals, statesmen, police, investigators, educators, businesspeople, and even communists, more often than not foil and disorganize organized movements and actions against casteist-capitalist-structural violence.[55] More recently, even low caste groups classified as “other backward castes” have been very successful at disorganizing radical structural challenges to state-capital accumulation projects often because of the way they are enlisted as beneficiaries of both reservations and development projects.[56] The disparities and inequities experienced by other backward castes and Dalits should not be conflated either by policy makers or scholars. Both occupy different structural positions historically and in the present. Conflating the inequities experienced by both necessarily leads to sloppy solutions in which OBC upliftment hides further Dalit descent down a social and economic ladder.

Because of the assumption that capitalism began in the West and spread outwards through empire, an assumption even Cedric Robinson made in Black Marxism, scholarly accounts of decolonization and internationalism tend to celebrate national liberation projects of the mid-twentieth century as exemplary of formal severance from western powers. But this is a mistake. Conceptions of “Asia” as an ahistorical geographic container or caste as timeless status could easily morph into the broader category “global south,” a category so broad that it often limits rather than enlivens the internationalist imagination. In the “global south” problems can too easily be conceived of as problems of “backwardness” or “underdevelopment” due to colonization and a belated modernization. Even positive accounts of a “peripheral” capitalism can serve to undermine working class aspirations in the global south, implying that they must wait before their time for freedom has come. But this is a mistake. It is the distinction between peoples rather than distinction between places that gives capital its power, everywhere.Only through international working class-based solidarity, a solidarity that must traverse formal and informal labor, wage and day labor, domestic and industrial labor, and free and unfree labor, can internationalism truly overcome the power of racialized capital everywhere.

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[1] The author would like to thank the following scholars for their reading and deep engagement with many drafts of this piece: Charisse Burden-Stelly, Natalie Etoke, Navyug Gill, Aparna Gopalan, Mishal Khan, Andy Liu, Malini Ranganathan, Anupama Rao, Nate Roberts, Dwaipayan Sen, and most especially Rupa Viswanath.

^[2]Natrajan and Greenough 2009.

[3] Several works have explored these resonances. See Visweswaran 2010; Loomba 2017.

[4] Gidla 2017; More 2020.

[5] Appadurai 2020.

[6] Mosse 2020.

[8]Ramnarayan Rawat’s study on Chamars, stigmatized now as caste-based leather workers, shows they were once agricultural workers, hence a once exalted people fallen through the transformations of Hindu dominated, colonial capitalism. Rawat 2011.

[9] Kumar 1965.

[10] Tilly 1998.

[11] Rao 2009, p. 81-82.

[12] The scholarship on caste that argues these things is rather voluminous but exemplary are Dirks 2001; Bayly 1999; Ahmad 1978.

[13] As has been found even in construction work of temples and motels in the United States: “Laborers From India Are Suing New Jersey Hindu Temple For Worker Abuse.” NPR, June 2, 2021: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002604394/laborers-from-india-are-suing-new-jersey-hindu-temple-for-worker-abuse; Annie Correal, “Hindu Sect Accused of Using Forced Labor at More Temples Across U.S.”New York Times, Nov. 10, 2021.

[14] See Khan in Leroy and Jenkins 2021.

[15] For a discussion of the distinction between formal and real subsumption, see “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production” in Marx 2004. For discussions of Marx’s understanding of slavery and industry see Johnson 2004.

[16] Robinson 2020, “Introduction.”

[17] Robinson 2020, Chapter 1.

[18] Robinson 2020, Chapter 2.

[19] Cox 1964, cited in Robinson 2020, “Preface to the 2000 edition.”

[20] Robinson 2020, Chapter 9.

[21]https://www.inversejournal.com/2019/12/25/marx-and-feminism-by-silvia-federici/

Federici 2004; Federici 2018; Federici 2021.

^[22] Fanon 1963.

^[23] Robinson discussed figures of unemployment, cycles of unemployment, cand even a criticism of Hobsbawm.

^[24] Not only had Marx missed how de-industrial numerous forms of production and laborers were in England, but as Walter Johnson has shown, even in the choice of example in the discussion on commodity fetishism, “Marx's substitution of (British) flax [linen] for (American) cotton as the emblematic raw material of English capitalism enabled him to tell what in essence was a story of the commodity form artificially hedged in by British national boundaries.” Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil,” 301-2.

[25] Sherlock 1998, p. 69. I would like to thank Nate Roberts for directing me to this article.

[26]Sherlock 1999, p. 70–2.

^[27]Dubois 2007, p. 694.

[28] Robinson 2020, “Introduction.”

[29]Pirenne 1956.

^[30] Peter James Hudson shows how, “Racial capitalism has a lineage that predates Cedric Robinson” in “Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat,” http://bostonreview.net/forum/remake-world-slavery-racial-capitalism-and-justice/peter-james-hudson-racial-capitalism-and

[31] Wallerstein 1976; Wood 1999.

[32] For instance, see Washbrook 1990.

^[33]Chakrabarty 2016. I would like to thank Dwaipayan Sen for pointing me to this article.

^[34]Liu 2019.

[35] This literature is large but includes Chaudhuri 1978; Pearson and Das Gupta 1987; Subrahmanyam and Bayly 1988; Subrahmanyam 2001. For a long review essay of three recent works situating them in the historiography of Indian Ocean history see Chhabria 2019.

^[36] Ludden 2005.

^[37] Parthasarathi 2011.

^[38] Wallerstein 1986. Wallerstein has modified his views and acknowledged a pre-European exchange network of which India was a part in some of his other writings.

^[39] Perlin 1983, 34.

[40] Gunder Frank 1998.

^[41] Banaji 1977.

[42] Banaji 2020.

[43] “Jairus Banaji: Towards a New Marxist Historiography” Interviewed by Félix Boggio Éwanjée-Épée and Frédéric Monferrand, HistoricalMaterialism.https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/interviews/jairus-banaji-towards-…

[44] See my and Andy Liu’s interview with Jairus Banaji here: https://www.borderlines-cssaame.org/posts/2021/1/18/where-is-the-workin…

^[45] This is a paraphrasing of Johnson 2004, p. 306.

[46] Robinson 2020, Chapter 9.

[47] Dohra 2009.

[48] Some works do make this start, see for example Guha 2013.

[49] Ranganathan 2021.

[50] Thompson 2011.

[51] Johnson 2016; Yamahatta-Taylor and Reed 2019.

[52] Teltumbde 2018.

^[53] More  2021.

^[54] Gidla 2017.

[55] Teltumbde 2018.

Teltumbde 2016; Teltumbde 2010.

[56] Teltumbde 2010. Teltumbde 2018.

Anti-racist debate today remains polarized between “class reductionist” (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and “liberal identity” (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective—racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward astructurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon on Anwar Shaikh and Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy; and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalism imperialism.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

The uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 has again placed the question of race at the center of politics.[1] While the right steadfastly denies the existence of racism and advocates greater repression against those protesting police violence, the left—both liberal and socialist—is scrambling to come to grips with the rebellion. For the liberals, the problem is simply a “lack of diversity”—the police, the middle classes, corporate America, and the political establishment do not “reflect” the population as a whole. The liberals hope to derail these struggles as they did those of the 1960s and 1970s, by promoting a new middle class of color without addressing the growing poverty and insecurity of working people of color. As Asad Haider^[2] has argued, the neo-liberals have transformed “identity politics” from an attack on racism, sexism, and capitalism into a demand to diversify the political and economic elite without tampering with capitalist class relations.

The US socialist left is also attempting to catch up with events. The main organization of the U.S. left, the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) was caught back-footed by these new struggles and has found it difficult to move from the routines of Democratic Party electoral politics to organizing an ongoing movement against racism and capitalism.^[3] Some in DSA have failed to embrace the most radical demands of the uprising—to defund, disarm, and disband the police—and instead argue for continued campaigning around “universal” demands to raise wages and the funding of public services—including the police.^[4]

Both the liberal “identitarian” and class reductionist positions, despite their divergent political trajectories, share a common conceptual starting point—they both view the relationship of racial oppression and capitalist exploitation as contingent rather thannecessary. This can be seen in radical and Marxian approaches to the relationship between racism and capitalism. While resting on very different theories of the origins and dynamics of capitalism, both Cedric Robinson’s^[5] highly influential theorization of “racial capitalism,” and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s[6] assertion of the possibility of a “non-racial” capitalism view the relationship capitalist exploitation and racial oppression as historically contingent.

Robinson’s begins from the problematic ‘commercialization model,’ where capitalism emerges out of the revival of European trade and is consolidated in Europe’s imperial expansion and the creation of the early modern Atlantic economy.[7] Racism, according to Robinson, already existed in Europe as early as classical antiquity, making racial oppression’s relationship with capitalism contingent on capitalism’s alleged dependence on European expansion in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Robinson’s assertion of a “long duree” of European racism is based on a fundamental confusion between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of differentiating human beings.^[8]Black Marxism leaves open the possibility that if capitalism had emerged outside of “racialized” European feudalism, racism would not be a feature of capitalism.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, one of the most perceptive theorists of the origins and expansion of capitalism, also explicitly rejects any necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression:

At the very least, class equality means something different and requires different conditions from sexual or racial equality. In particular, the abolition of class inequality would by definition mean the end of capitalism. But is the same necessarily true about the abolition of sexual or racial inequality? Sexual and racial equality… are not in principle incompatible with capitalism…although class exploitation is constitutive of capitalism as sexual or racial inequalities are not, capitalism subjects all social relations to its requirements. It can co-opt and reinforce inequalities and oppressions that it did not create and adapt them to the interests of class exploitation.^[9]

Wood confuses the theoretical and historical preconditions of capitalist social property relations with the results—the unintended consequences of the reproduction of these social property relations.^[10] Wood argues, correctly, that racial oppression is not a necessary precondition for the establishment of capitalist social-property relations. The necessary preconditions of capitalist production are the emergence of producers and non-producers who are compelled to reproduce themselves through market competition—through the operation of the law of value. Historically, racism was the result, not the cause, of the global expansion of English capitalism in the 17^th century. While not a precondition of capitalism, there are strong theoretical reasons to argue that racial oppression is anecessary consequence of the expansion and reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Similar methodological and theoretical problems haunt other attempts, influenced by notions of intersectionality, to analyze the relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The roots of intersectionality can be found in the “dual systems” theories of gender oppression that emerged in the late 1970s. Many socialist-feminists had concluded that Marxism was a “gender blind” theory capable of grasping the dynamics of class exploitation, but possessing few insights into the dynamics of an independent “sex/gender” system of patriarchal oppression that coexisted with capitalism.^[11] In the last twenty years, theories of intersectionality have expanded the notion of multiple systems to race, sexual preference, gender identity, and differential ability. While the earliest version of intersectionality saw distinct systems of class, gender, racial and other forms of oppression shaping social identities and practices, later versions have attempted a more integrative perspective. Patricia Hill Collins^[12] collates oppressions in “matrices” and attempts to explore the interrelationships between different vectors of oppression. Ashley Bohrer’s^[13] work is the most rigorous attempt to date to reconcile Marxism and intersectionality, arguing that capital’s social domination is based on both exploitation and oppression.

All of the variants of intersectionality suffer from a number of analytic problems. The earliest versions suffer from the same issues as dual-systems theory identified by Lise Vogel in the early 1970s—a failure to consistently specify the dynamics of patriarchy and its relationship to capitalism.^[14] Holly Lewis, in her path-breaking analysis of gender and sexuality, argues that intersectionality “assumes that each system of oppression is a vector with a nebulous origin intersecting with the individual subject... Disconnected from material life, oppression seems it as if it “were born of ill will and bad ideas.”^[15] Not only are the origins and trajectory of each separate “street” of oppression unspecified, but as Tithi Bhattacharya argues intersectionality fails to specify “the logic of their intersection.”^[16] The later and more sophisticated versions of the theory avoid the “atomistic”^[17] methods of the earlier versions, but work from an idealized understanding of capitalist accumulation and competition.^[18] Specifically, the latter incarnations of intersectionality assert that Marxist theorizations of accumulation and competition posit the homogenization of both capitalists and workers, and are thus incapable of explaining gendered and racialized divisions amongst them.

This misunderstanding of the dynamics of the reproduction of capitalist social relations is evident in the work of David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch.^[19] They have produced a rich description of how both capitalists and wage workers deploy race—the myth of intrinsic and unchangeable differences amongst humans—to defend and advance their social positions in capitalist societies. They provide a detailed map of both shifting “racial boundaries” within the working class across time; and the persistence of racialization throughout the history of US capitalism. However, racism remains an independent vector of oppression that operates externally to, but in afunctional relationship to capitalist accumulation and competition. Roediger and Esch argue, as does Boeher and others, that the operation of the law of valuehomogenizes labor--- equalizing wages, conditions of work and the like:^[20] For them, racism exists because it is functional for capital—as a mechanism to ideologically and politically divide an increasingly homogeneous working class. As do other intersectional theorists, Roediger and Esch deploy a simplistic understanding of capitalist accumulation and competition that leaves them unable to explain how the structure of capitalism both compels andenables^[21] capitalists to ideologically and politically differentiate workers whose conditions of life and work are ostensibly becominghomogeneous.[22]

Lise Vogel’s seminal, but long ignored, attempt to construct a unitary theory of gender oppression provides a model for transcending the dilemmas of contingent theories of racial oppression and capitalism. Vogel situates women’s oppressionwithin the real dynamics of capitalist accumulation, which requires the continuous reproduction of capitalism’s “special commodity,” labor-power. There are three aspects to the social reproduction of labor-power: the capacity to work must be reproduced daily (workers must be fed, clothed, etc. to appear at work each day), those who cannot work (the young, the old and the disabled) must be cared for, and the working class must be reproduced inter-generationally. While capitalism has found various ways to organize the daily reproduction of labor-power and the care of non-workers—work-camps, single-sex dormitories, immigration, old-age homes, orphanages, etc.—thegenerational reproduction of labor-power requires both thesocial andbiological reproduction of human beings. All class societies socially organize the biological capacities (childbearing and nursing) that create women’s “differential role in the reproduction of labor-power.” Capitalism takes hold of and transforms the main site of the daily and intergenerational reproduction of labor-power, the family/household, creating “a severe spatial, temporal, and institutional separation between domestic labor and the capitalist production process.”^[23] Women’s primary responsibility for the privatized, “domestic” aspects of social reproduction is the matrix for the production of gender oppression.

What follows is an attempt to sketch a unitary or necessity theory of capitalism and racial oppression. We begin with a rigorous understanding of both the necessary dynamics of capitalist reproductionand the radical discontinuity between non-capitalist and capitalist forms of social production. Contrary to most radical and “Marxian” accounts of capitalist accumulation and competition, we will argue they do nothomogenize capitalists and workers. Instead, accumulation and competition necessarily produce heterogeneity of profit rates, labor-processes and wage rates. The dynamics of the capitalist mode of production—market-competition and the continuous development of the productivity of labor through labor-saving technological innovation—cannot explain the emergence and expansion of this form of social labor. The continuing process of “primitive accumulation”—thecreation of capitalist social property relations—requires political-legal coercion and, in many circumstances, does not immediately produce specifically capitalist social relations of production.[24] These social and historical processes create the matrix for the production and reproduction of race—the notion that humanity is divided into distinct groups withunchangeable characteristics that make one groupinherently superior and other groupsinherently inferior—as the “mental road map of lived experience” of both exploiters and exploited under capitalism.

This analysis owes a profound debt to three Marxian thinkers in the Black Radical tradition, whose attempts to grapple with the relationship of capitalism and racial oppression prefigure what I argue here. W.E.B. DuBois is best known for his notion that white working class and popular racism is rooted in a “public and psychological wage” that gives them political rights and social deference. While he used this term only once in his magisterial Black Reconstruction, in most of his other work he roots racist ideology and practices inlabor-market competition. ^[25] In his analysis of the 1919 St. Louis “race riot”—a white working-class pogrom against newly arrived Black workers—DuBois argued:

If the white workingmen of East St. Louis felt sure that Negro workers would not and could not take the bread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never have been translated into murder. If the black workingmen of the South could earn a decent living under decent circumstances at home, they would not be compelled to underbid their white fellows.[26]

Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Race, Class and Caste^[27] made the first systematic attempt to analyze the necessary relationship between capitalist exploitation and racial oppression. Cox, despite sharing Robinson’s commercialization model of the origins of capitalism, clearly distinguished between pre-capitalist forms of differentiating humans, in particularcaste, and the distinctively capitalist form,racism.[28] Ruth Wilson Gilmore[29] deploys an analysis of the reserve army of labor since the 1970s to reveal the actual social basis for the expansion of racialized incarceration in the United States. Her insights into the capitalist management of growing “relative surplus populations” informs our analysis of the necessary relationship between capitalist accumulation and racial oppression.

Accumulation, Competition, “Primitive Accumulation”

Contrary to most interpretations of capitalism and its origins, including many ostensibly Marxist accounts, capitalist reproduction through competition and accumulation and the process by which capitalism emerges are not elements of the “material” economic “base” which in turn determines the “social superstructure” of culture and politics.[30] Contrary to notions that trans-historical processes—market competition, technological innovation, and plunder—produce and structure capitalism, capitalist accumulation and competition and “primitive accumulation” are social and historical processes.[31] Put simply, specific social property relations—relations amongst human beings (class relations) and between humans and nature (labor processes)—shape the social dynamics of any form of social production and co-constitute the political and cultural relations, including specific forms of oppression, of these forms of production.

Under capitalism, both producers and non-producers must reproduce themselves through market competition. On the one hand, the capitalists’ continued possession of the means of production requires compelling workers to produce at or below the socially average necessary labor-time—they must “sell to survive.” On the other hand, the dispossession of workers from non-market forms of subsistence makes them dependent on wage labor for survival, and easily hired and fired by capital. These social property relations, as we will argue in detail below, do not lead to economic equilibrium or the homogenization of profits rates, labor-processes, or wage rates. Instead, they give rise to the uniquely capitalist dynamics of accumulation and real competition through the uneven and combined mechanization of production—processes that necessarily produce heterogeneous social classes. “Primitive accumulation” is not a process of spreading markets, technological innovation running up against the “obstacle” of “outdated” social relations or simple geographic expansion, plunder and looting of the non-capitalist world. Instead, primitive accumulation—the transformation of means of production into capital and of direct producers into wage labor—is the unintended consequence of the struggle between non-capitalist exploiters and exploited attempting to reproduce themselves as non-capitalist classes. In sum, the emergence and development of the capitalist “economy” arehistorical and social processes of the creation and reproduction of distinctive social class relations.

Nor are politics and ideology “social superstructures” separate and apart from the “material base.” Instead, these ostensibly “superstructural” elements part of:

…a continuous structure of social relations and forms with varying degrees of distance from the immediate process of production and appropriation, beginning with those relations and forms that constitute the system of production itself. The connections between ‘base’ and superstructure’ can then be traced without great conceptual leaps because they do not represent two essentially different and discontinuous orders of reality.”[32]

From this perspective, ideology is not a free-floating set of cultural ideals or discourses separate and apart from the social relations that constitute social production. Nor is it mere propaganda “imposed” on a passive population through the media, schools and the like; or the equivalent of “doctrine,” a coherent and stable set of beliefs about the world. Instead, ideologies are the “mental road map of lived experience”– the “vocabulary of day-to-day action and experience” shaped by social property relations.[33] These mental road maps change as the lived experience of social relations change through practice and conflict. Put another way, ideological notions and practices, including racial oppression, are “co-constituted” by the reproduction of specific social relations of production and form part of the “internal relations” of different modes of production.[34]

Most Marxists and non-Marxists attribute to Marx a theory of value, accumulation, and competition that homogenizes capital and labor. This reflects neither Marx’s mature theory inCapital nor the actual history of capitalism. Instead, the reproduction of capitalism does nothomogenize but constantlydifferentiates capitalists and workers.^[35]  The operation the law of value—where the exchange-value of different commodities are expressed in the amount of socially average abstract labor time required to produce them—does not depend upon thehomogenization of labor. Rather, it is capitalist competition and accumulation that allows the products of fundamentallydifferentconcrete human labor-processes to exchange asequivalents byabstracting from those concrete differences.^[36]

The notions that accumulation and competition homogenize conditions of production confuse Marx’s account ofreal competition with neo-classical economics’idealized vision of competition. “Perfect competition,” where numerous firms are passive “price-takers” and any firm’s market advantage is temporary at best, produces uniform profit rates and wages. This vision of competition makes the existing economic order appear efficient and just.Real capitalist competition has little to do with the dream world of neo-classical economics. Real competition is fought through what Marx called the “heavy artillery of fixed capital”—constant technological innovation, taking the form of the increasing mechanization of production—for market share won at the expense of other producers. According to Shaikh,^[37] “real competition, antagonistic by nature and turbulent by nature… is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet.”

Real competition and accumulation through increasing the mechanization of production creates heterogeneity among capitalists and workers. The process of the division of tasks and their mechanization in one branch of production leads to a portion of the workforce being made redundant for capital. This constant replenishment thereserve army of labor, the mass of unemployed and underemployed, not only regulates wages within the boundaries of profitability, but creates the possibility ofheterogeneous labor-processes, profit-rates, and wages between branches of industry. While the increasingly capital-intensive industries enjoy higher profits and the possibility of higher wages, the constant replenishing of the reserve army allows the constant reproduction oflabor-intensive industries with lower profits and lower wages. In other words, “sweated labor” under capitalism is not some atavistic hangover of earlier forms of production, but the necessary consequence of the continued, but necessarily uneven and combined mechanization of production.^[38]

The constant generation of the reserve army, with workers experiencing different levels of precarity and desperation, produce workers who have little choice but to accept the worst jobs across the economy. In the presence of the reserve army, the mobility of capital and labor sets limits to, but cannot eliminate, overall wage differentiation. Low wage sectors can avoid raising wages by tapping into pools of desperate workers. Low-wage industries often draw from specific labor-reserves—specific layers of unemployed and underemployed workers whose labor-power is reproduced under distinctive social conditions—in order to maintain their profitability.^[39] Migrant workers are a contemporary example of such a distinct reserve army of labor. The physical separation of inter-generational reproduction in the global South and day-to-day reproduction in the global North, allows capitalists in low wage industries to pay wages below the costs of reproduction of labor-power in the global North.^[40] “Undocumented” immigrants’ lack of the most minimal political rights enjoyed by “citizens” intensifies the precarious conditions of the social reproduction of this segment of the reserve army of labor.

Competition within and between industries also necessarily differentiates labor-processes, profits and wage rates. In the competitive “war of all against all,” firms with older investments in fixed capital have difficulty reducing unit costs and raising profit margins and rates. However, they cannot abandon these investments immediately in favor of new and more efficient methods. Capitalist investment in buildings, machinery, and the like create barriers to immediately adopting new techniques orexiting a branch of production. Capitals with older and less efficient fixed capital, thenon-regulating capitals, haveno choice but to remain in business until their investments are amortized. They compete with “state of the art” capitals, theregulating capitals, by paying below average wages, and intensifying work through speed-up, sub-division of tasks, and other means of increasing absolute surplus-value extraction.^[41]

Contrary to contemporary usage, “primitive accumulation” is not simply a process of the accumulation of wealth through plunder, slavery, and colonialism.[42] Marx explicitly rejected this notion in Capital, arguing that it reduces the process of primitive accumulation to a morality tale in which “the frugal elite” accumulate wealth through means fair and foul, while “the lazy rascals” are left with no choice but to labor for their betters.[43] Means of production and subsistence become capital only when means of production are transformed into a commodity whose possession requires successful market competition. It is only on the basis of new social relations of production that the wealth appropriated through the colonization and plunder is accumulated as productive capital rather than transformed into pre-capitalist forms of surplus extraction.[44]

Primitive accumulation necessarily requires non-market compulsion.[45] All non-capitalist forms of production are based on the direct producers’ effective possession of means of production or subsistence, and the non-producers use of non-market coercion to appropriate surpluses from the direct producers. Prior to capitalism, the reproduction of both the exploiters and exploited was not predicated on successful market competition through specialization, technical innovation and accumulation, but instead on these classes’ political organization. As a result, neither the growth of markets nor the development of labor-productivity could displace non-capitalist social relations and replace them with those of capitalism. Instead, the deployment of legal and political force was necessary to force producers to become market dependent (the imposition of capitalist ground rent, public land systems, etc.) and to compel the expropriated to sell their labor-power (enforcing the closure of access to common lands through state violence, taxations, forced labor and various forms of servitude, etc.) Both the original process in England in the sixteenth century, and the uneven and combined geographic expansion of capitalism globally in the five centuries afterwards was “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”[46]

Capitalism and Racist Ideology and Practices

Why do the creation and reproduction of capitalist class relations necessarily lead to racialization—the division of humanity into distinct groups withunchangeable characteristics that make one group inherently superior and others inherently inferior? Accumulation and competition give rise to a contradictory lived experience for both capitalists and workers. Capitalism is the first form of social labor in human history where exploitation takes place through whatappears to be theexchange of equivalents in the labor-market.^[47] Rather than relying on personal domination or other forms of extra-economic coercion, capitalists and workers confront each other on the labor-market as owners of distinctive commodities—capitalists own the means of production, workers their labor-power. Capitalists purchase the workers’ capacity to work generally at its value—the historically constituted social conditions of the reproduction of labor-power. As capitalistconsume labor-power—put workers to work in labor-processes under the command of capital—workers are compelled to produce valuein excess of the value of their wages.

The buying and selling of labor-power gives rise to a very specific vocabulary of lived experience that spontaneously disguises exploitation and produces the notion of theequality of all human beings. InValue, Price, and Profit,^[48]  Marx argued that under slavery all labor appears unpaid, and under serfdom the division between paid and unpaid labor is clearly visible in the division of crops and labor. By contrast, under capitalism “even the unpaid labor seems to bepaid labor” because “the nature of the whole transaction is completely masked by theintervention of a contract…” InCapital, Marx identified how this produces a distinctive ideology, “the sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.”^[49]

However, once we leave the idealized world of commodity exchange, we enter the real world of capitalist production, accumulation, and competition, which necessarily producessubstantial inequalities—between capital and labor, within the working class and between societies in the capitalist world economy. In pre-capitalist societies, human inequality wasassumed to be part of the “order of things;” inscribed in relations of personal dependence and extra-economic coercion. By contrast, the actuality of inequality must beexplained under capitalism in a way that iscompatible with the notion that human beingsshould be free and equal. This requires are-naturalization of difference—the division of humanity into groups withunchangeable characteristics making some inherently superior, others inferior. Only if some people are viewed as and treated as less than “fully human” can either capitalists or groups of competing workers make sense of a society where all appear to be equal, but there is real inequality between and within classes.

A similarly contradictory lived experience marks the process of the geographic expansion of capitalism.[50] On the one hand, capitalist imperialism presents itself as “universalizing” the “benefits of civilization” -- the “fair and equal exchange” of the market and the blessing of capitalist “improvement,” the development of the productivity of labor through technical innovation and accumulation. Unfortunately for capital, the subordination of non-capitalist producers to market compulsion cannot be achieved on the basis of “fair and equal exchange” or “out-producing backward producers,” because both non-capitalist exploiters and exploited have effective possession of means of production and subsistence. As a result, race becomes central to the “mental road map of lived experience” that explains and justifies the violent expropriation of non-capitalist producers and the establishment of capitalist social property relations.[51]

Racial and gender differentiation are the most common ways both capitalists and workers navigate the contradictory lived experience of capitalist development. Gender differences are ideologically reduced to biology—gender is equated with sexual differentiation-- which purportedly explains women’sinherent inferiority to me. While race has no biological existence, the process of racialization socially constructs differences that are purported to be permanent and unchangeable.^[52] Racialization naturalizes differences in physical appearances, religion, language, and the like.^[53] Racist ideology, with its notion of inherent andunchangeable relations of inequality provides a potent mental road map for both capitalists and workers of the contradictory lived experience of the creation and reproduction of capitalist social property relations.

The History of Racism

If racism is a central “vocabulary of the lived experience” of the creation and reproduction of capitalism, then it must have a distinct history. The notion that race and racism existtrans-historically, at least since European antiquity is at the heart of Cedric Robinson’sBlack Marxism.^[54] Other scholars^[55] have rooted Ancient ‘racism’ in the belief that differences between “civilized” and “barbaric” groups were rooted in environmental factors that became inheritable. However, even proponents of a Greco-Roman racism admit that the inheritance of acquired characteristics were not seen as“constant and stable”^[56] from one generation to another. Put another way, a new physical environment could easily produce new social and behavioral characteristics—making themfluid and flexible. In addition, those claiming the existence of racialization in classical antiquity have not demonstrated that certain groups wereexcluded from political life if they paid rent, taxes, or tribute to their rulers. In fact, there is considerable evidence of Africans, in particular, being integrated into the Greek and Roman states as soldiers and public officials.^[57]

Before capitalism, humanity was differentiated by religion (“heathens and believers”) and kinship-community (“strangers and neighbors/kin”). Both tended to be highly flexible and changeable through conversion, adoption, and the like. In almost all non-capitalist forms of social labor, class exploitation was indistinguishable from political-legal unfreedom, making inequality appear “natural.” Pre-capitalist imperialism did not generally disrupt the direct producers’ effective possession of means of production and subsistence, but transferred lordship or politically regulated trade monopolies from one group of non-capitalist exploiters to another.[58] Thus, the fluid character of “othering” provided an adequate understanding of the lived experience of these social and historical processes. Under capitalism, race is a form of human differentiation where distinguishing characteristics become unchangeable. According to Go,^[59] “it is not that capitalism was built on prior racial differences; rather, capitalism served to racialize the preexisting ethnic division of labor, turning religious, cultural, or linguistic differences into ‘racial’ ones to legitimate its new exploitative strictures… racialization… was a part of modern capitalism, not its precursor.”

There is evidence that an early form of “proto-racism” emerged in one region of pre-capitalist Europe.^[60] In late fourteenth and early fifteenth century Castile and Aragon, the conquering Christian monarchs forcibly expelled the previous Muslim rulers and those Jewish bankers and merchants who failed to convert to Christianity. By the mid-fifteenth century, as competition for venal offices in the new Absolutist monarchies intensified, Christians began to exclude Muslims and Jews who had converted to Christianity (conversos or “New Christians”) from the ranks of the nobility and key public offices. The claim was that these converts lacked “purity of blood” (limpieza de sange), and detailed genealogical records demonstrating that families had been Christians for several generations became a prerequisite for social advancement. With the unification of Spanish absolutism in 1492, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims who refused to convert, and the exclusion ofconversos became generalized.^[61] Despite its emergence in late feudal Iberia, the generalization of race did not occur across European Absolutism, where the continued reality of non-market coercion made human inequality continue to appear to benatural.

Racial oppression in its modern form was crystallized two centuries later during the English capitalist colonization of Virginia.^[62] When legal unfreedom is the typical status of the laboring classes, as it was in most pre-capitalist societies including Virginia before the late seventeenth century, inequality wasassumed. It was only when all other forms of bonded labor, in particular indentured servitude, were abolished in early eighteenth-century Virginia, that the enslavement of people of African descent needed to beexplained andjustified. The notion of race was systematized to justify the unfreedom of Africans alone in a society wherelegal freedom and equality were becoming the norm. According to Fields:

By the Age of Revolution, English society and its American offspring [shared-CP] … the assumption that the individual is the proprietor of his own person… [This notion—CP] had advanced sufficiently to make bondage a condition for calling for justification and to narrow the basis on which such a justification might rest. Slavery by then could be neither taken for granted nor derived from self-evident general principles. Pro-slavery and antislavery publicists… unconsciously collaborated in locating that basis of the slaves’ presumed incapacity from freedom, an incapacity that crystallized into a racial one and all of its subsequent pseudo-biological trappings.” ^[63]

While plantation slavery in Virginia was a non-capitalist form of production,^[64] it emerged as part of the first process of capitalist colonization.^[65] The break through to capitalist agriculture in England in the sixteenth century gave rise to a mass consumer market among prosperous capitalist tenant farmers. Merchants operating outside the declining system of royal monopolies sought to supply this market, initiating plantation production of sugar and tobacco in the English Caribbean and southern North American mainland. While the new merchants were unable to establish capitalist social relations in their colonies, the colonies were extensions of the first capitalist society—the first society where juridical-legal freedom and equality was becoming the norm.

Forms and Variations of Racism

Race and racism did not disappear with the abolition of New World slavery, but instead becomes generalized across the capitalist world. The specific terms of racist ideology, whatspecific characteristics made some groups superior and others inferior, and the forms of racial oppression varied according to thespecific historical forms capitalist social relations and their geographic expansion took. Unfortunately, many critical social scientists have attempted to grasp these variations through the notion of “racial formations.”[66] These typologies often take on a ‘life of their own,” leading to attempts to assign distinctive dynamics to each idealized “racial formation” and a loss of the historical specificity of each set of racist ideologies and practices. Instead, we need to proceed from the abstract understanding of the necessity of racial oppression to capitalist reproduction and expansion, and then move to the concrete, historical specificity of racial oppression in specific, historically constituted capitalist societies.

For example, in the aftermath of the abolition of US plantation slavery, the forms of racism changed because “there is, after all, a profound difference in social meaning between a planter who experiences black people as ungrateful, untrustworthy, and half-witted slaves and a planter who experiences black people as undisciplined, irregular and refractory employees.”^[67] Through the history of capitalist imperialism, the racialization of indigenous populations varied according to whether these people were forcibly expelled to make room for “white” settlers (US Native Americans, Australian “Aborigines,” Palestinians, etc.) or were compelled, under varying degrees of legal coercion, to labor for wages for their conquerors (South Africa, part of colonial India, most of Latin America since the early twentieth century, etc.) In the former case, the indigenous populations are seen as inherently incapable of “improving” land in a capitalist manner and must be expropriated and expelled to make room for “civilized” farmers and workers. In the latter case, the indigenous people are seen as having inherently different requirements for social reproduction and commitment to “steady work.”

Under specifically capitalist accumulation and competition, the differentiation of capital and labor spontaneously generates the notion that different groups of workers have unchangeable characteristics, making some inherently more or less “reliable” workers.Both capitalists and workers, especially when working class organizations like unions are weak, utilize race as a way of ordering the access to employment. The constant subdivision and mechanization of tasks characteristic of capitalism, creates a mass of workers in both the active and reserve armies of labor who can perform almost any specific job.^[68] Workers and capitalists invent fictional racial “characteristics” to determine who are the most “reliable” and “efficient” workers for different tasks.^[69]   At the center of this process of constructing a racial “roadmap of lived experience” is the notion that different “races” have inherently different costs of social reproduction and capacities to produce different quanta of surplus value (inherently different levels of skill, intelligence, motivation, and productivity).

English capitalists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century viewed the Irish, who were being rapidly expropriated by English landlords, as ignorant and crude peasants whose costs of reproduction and capacity for “steady” and skilled work was less than those of English workers. The Irish were deemed suitable only for “pick and shovel” work on the docks, canal and railroad construction, and the most deskilled positions in manufacturing.^[70] In the US, capitalists developed an elaborate racial hierarchy of costs of reproduction and work capacities for the Irish in the early nineteenth century and the varied southern and eastern European immigrants in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.^[71] As Blacks are expelled from southern agriculture before and during World War I, their purported lower costs of social reproduction and lesser capacities for “disciplined labor’ justified their assignment to the least desirable, lowest skill and most poorly paid work in industry. The racialization of the labor-market is evident in the global South as well, as British and later Arab capitalists assigned different costs of reproduction and laboring capacities to different groups of migrant workers in the Gulf ports.^[72]

The process of the racialization of the labor market and reserve armies does not proceed simply “from above”—through the agency of capitalists—but “from below” – through the activity of workers when collective action and organization against capital does not appear viable. Working class racism is rooted in the contradictory position of workers under capitalism: “workers are not only collective producers with a common interest in taking collective control over social production. They are alsoindividual sellers of labor power in conflict with each other over jobs, promotions, etc.”^[73] As competing sellers of labor power, workers are open to the appeal of politics that pit them against other workers—especially workers in a weaker social position. For example, Skilled artisanal workers in the early nineteenth century US attempt to socially construct themselves as “white” to protect themselves from the pressures of the reserve army of labor and the threat of being easily replaced as capital deskilled their work. Fears of impoverization and deskilling fueled antebellum northern white skilled workers projection “onto Black workers what they still desired in terms of the imagined absence of alienation, even as they bridled at being treated as slaves or ‘white n*ggers.’”^[74] By the mid-nineteenth century, competition between for unskilled work in northern cities led to racist pogroms by Irish workers against African Americans, culminating in the bloody “draft riots” in New York and other cities during the Civil War.^[75] As the mass migration of African-Americans to the northern cities began before World War I, competition among workers exploded in the “race riots” of 1919, and again in the wave of “hate strikes” during World War II.^[76] In the past four decades, the support of a minority of older, white workers for right-wing politicians, beginning with Reagan and culminating in Trump, reflect a similar dynamic^[77]. Satnam Virdee^[78] traces similar racialized competition stimulating working class racism in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Multi-racial working-class unity will not be produced spontaneously-- it will require the rebuilding a culture and organization of solidarity among workers.^[79] Clearly, struggles for universal, class wide demands—higher wages, greater job security, health care (“Medicare for All”) and pensions not tied to employment, etc.—reduce competition among workers and are a necessary, but not sufficient conditions for building a multi-racial workers’ movement. The mainstream of the industrial union movement of the 1930s and 1940s made “color-blind” appears to workers, allowing racial divisions to deepen and contributing to the failure to organize the southern US.^[80]Race-specific demands like defunding and disarming the police, ending housing and residential segregation, plant and industry-wide seniority,^[81] affirmative action in hiring and promotion, full citizenship rights for all immigrants upon arrival, an end to racial harassment and discrimination on the job, and the like will be essential to building multiracial working class solidarity. The experience of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Negro Labor Congress, the Negro American Labor Council, and Black and Latino caucuses in unions in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrate that a multiracial workers’ movement also requires self-organization by workers of color within the broader labor movement. Finally, non-work place movements against racism, like the uprising of 2020, have radicalized workers and promoted multiracial unity. Put simply,effective class organization and politics—forging working class unity among a racially heterogeneous class—must includeanti-racism.

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[1] The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, the editors of Historical Materialism, Tithi Bhattacharya, Howard Botwinick, Robert Brenner, David Camfield, Sue Ferguson, Todd Gordon, Kate Doyle-Griffiths, Asad Haider, Paul Heideman, Aaron Jaffe, David McNally, Kim Moody, Richard Seymour, and Lise Vogel, for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. I want to acknowledge, as well, the participants in my “Capitalism, Race and Class” seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Fall of 2016 and Spring of 2020, and in the Graduate Center Political Economy Workshop in November 2018 where many of these ideas were discussed. A special thanks as well to Satnam Virdee, with whom I have debated these issues in other venues. This essay is dedicated to the memory of James A. Geschwender (1933-2020), who taught me how to think about race and class when I was his graduate student at Binghamton.

[2] 2018.

[3]Activist Roundtable, 2020

[4] Chibber 2020 and Guastella 2020.

[5] 1983.

[6] 1995, Chapter 9.

[7] Wallerstein 1974. For a thorough theoretical and historical critique of this approach, see Brenner 1977 and Wood 2002.

[8] Go 2020, pp. 3-4 makes a similar point.

[9] 1995 p. 259.

[10] Arruzza 2015 and 2015.

[11] Hartman 1979

[12] 2000.

[13] 2019.

[14] 2013, Chapter 2.

[15] 2016, pp. 273-274.

[16] 2017, p 17. 

[17] McNally 2017.

[18] Jaffe 2020, Chapter 2020.

[19] 2012.

[20] Roediger and Esch’s understanding of value theory, accumulation, and competition are drawn from Lebowitz 2006.

[21] The notion that structures both compel and enable agents to act in determinant ways is drawn from Callinicos 2006.

[22] Julian Go’s attempt to resolve the tensions in Robinson’s account of racial capitalism suffers from a similar problem. Go deploys David Harvey’s (2014) distinction between “Marx’s theory of capital and histheory of capitalism.” The theory of “capital” in theGrundrisse andCapital works at level of abstraction that cannot account for “categories of race, gender, or ethnicity… because they are too concrete.” (Go 2020, p. 5) By contrast, Marx’s theory of “capitalism” refers to attempts to deploy his theory of “capital” to explain concrete historical developments, including racial oppression. However, Go argues that the relationship of capitalism and racism remain historical and contingent, because it is not possible “to deduce, from the categories of Marx’s theory [of Capital—CP], the necessity of racism or racial differentiations in society.” Harvey’s distinction between a “theory of capital” and a “theory of capitalism” confuses scientific abstraction with the construction of ideal types, which makes a rigorous relationship between theory and history impossible. See Post 2021 for a more detailed exposition of these issues in another context.

[23] Vogel 2013, pp. 151,159.

[24] Legally coerced wage labor continues to be reproduced through capitalist accumulation and competition, in particular in branches of social production where capital relies on highly skilled labor or must pay wages often below the cost of social reproduction to remain competitive and profitable. See Post 2016.

[25] DuBois 1920, Chapter IV. See Melchor 2019 for a discussion of DuBois’ belief that labor-market competition made interracial labor unionism impossible in the US prior to World War II.

[26] 1920, pp. 66-67.

[27] 1948.

[28] Drawing on the work of Cox, Raju (2021) makes a powerful critique of recent attempts to equate caste and racial oppression. Charissee Burden-Stelly (2020) defends Cox’s rejection of the equation of race and caste against Isabel Wilkerson (2020).

[29] 2007, pp. 70-78. Bhattacharyya’s (2018, p. 5) analysis of racial capitalism, despite its reliance on notions of intersectionality, also highlight the way in which capitalist accumulation produces “edge populations” of the unemployed and underemployed globally, whose “racialization… arises retrospectively as a result of marginalization from structures of production and/or the formal labor market… the fiction of race springs up, conveniently and almost spontaneously, to give rationale to the exigencies of capital.”

[30] This version of Marxism, which is rooted in the “systematization” of Marxism by the Second International, continues to shape the approach of both “productive forces” Marxists like G.A. Cohen (1980) and “structural” Marxist of the Althusserian school. This approach mars Hall’s (1980) provocative, but ultimately disappointing attempt to theorize racism.

[31] See Wood 1995, Part I and LaFrance 2021, pp. 85-92.

[32] Wood 1995, pp.25-26.

[33] Our approach to ideology is indebted to the work of Fields, 1990, pp. 110-113.

[34] McNally 2015.

[35] Shaikh 2016, Botwinick 2018

[36] A similar point, derived from Shaikh’s work, is made in Chibber 2013 pp. 133-137, 145-147.

[37] 2016, p. 14.

[38] Botwinick 2018, Chapter 3.

[39] Friedman 1984.

[40] The original formulation of the physical separation of inter-generational and day-to-day reproduction of labor power as the basis of migratory labor system was in Buroway 1976. For a recent deployment of this argument in social reproduction theory see Ferguson and McNally 2014.

[41]This argument should not be confused with ‘dual economy’ theories that posit a “core” with permanently higher profits and wages than the “peripheral” regions of the economy. See Botwinick 2018, Chapters 5-7 for a detailed argument on how the “turbulent regulation” of profit rates, profit margins and wage rates through real capitalist competition prevent any branch of production or individual capital from permanently retaining its “core” position

[42] For a thorough review and critique of the recent literature on primitive accumulation see Roberts 2017.

[43] Marx 1976, p. 873.

[44] Blackburn 1997, Chapter XII details how the profits from Absolutist France’s slave colonies flowed into the purchase of feudal estates and venal office, while only the profits from capitalist England’s’ slave colonies were accumulated as productive capital.

[45] Brenner 1977 and Wood 2002.

[46] Marx 1976, p. 875.

[47] Marx 1976, Chapter 6.

[48] 1910 pp. 83-86.

[49] 1976 p. 280.

[50] This is account of specifically capitalist imperialism is based on Wood 2003, Chapters 4-6.

[51] Jessica Evans (2018), working from a similar understanding of capitalist imperialism, analyzes how the Canadian transition to capitalist agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century led to the racialization of the indigenous people as a group “incapable” of “improving” landed property. Bonnett 1998 traces how European imperialist expansion transformed non-European forms of differentiating people, racializing non-Europeans as non-white and inherently inferior. Other works, which do not share our understanding of capitalist imperialism have produced insightful descriptions of the ways in which capitalist colonization has led to the racialization of non-Europeans in a variety of frameworks. See Bhandar 2018, Bhattacharrya 2018, Lentin 2020, Wolfe 2016.

[52] Such “permanent and unchangeable” characteristics are often viewed as biological. However, in the post-World War II era racial differences became “inherited and unchangeable” cultural characteristics. While liberal discourses of “assimilation” and “diversity” often call on the racially oppressed to adapt the cultural characteristics of “whites” (“pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”), the structural obstacles to the majority of those constituted as “non-white” to become “respectable” leads to liberal despair about “cultures of poverty.” See Steinberg 1989, Party Two Introduction and Chapter 4 for a discussion of ‘culture’ in racist discourses in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

[53] Virdee 2014 provides an account of “non-color coded” racism in Britain. Roediger 2005 brilliantly charts the shifting boundaries of race among European immigrant workers in the 20^th century US.

[54] 1983.

[55] Isaac 2004.

[56] Isaac 2009 p. 42.

[57] Snowden 1983, Chapter 4.

[58] Wood 2003, Chapters 2-3.

[59] 2020 pp. 3-4

[60] I want to thank David Camfield bringing this to my attention.

[61] Herring Tore’s, et al, 2012, and Nirenberg 2009.

[62] Morgan 1975, Fields 1990, Virdee 2018 pp. 11-15. Many Marxists embrace Theodore Allen’s (1995 and 1997) claims in his that racism emerges simultaneously in Colonial Virginia and during the English colonization of Ireland. However, as David Camfield has pointed out in comments on an earlier version of this essay, the oppression of Irish Catholics was not racial—if they converted to Protestantism, they would enjoy the same rights as other Irish Protestants.

[63] Fields 1982 pp. 161-162.

[64] Post 2012, Chapter 3.

[65] Wood 2003, Chapters 4-5; Brenner 1993, Part One.

[66] Omi and Winant 2015.

[67]Fields 1990 pp. 154-155.

[68] Braverman 1974. Unfortunately, most readers of Braverman’s masterpiece tend to equate deskilling with the homogenization of labor. Braverman himself was quite clear that the tendency to deskill work constantlydifferentiates work.

[69] I am deeply indebted to Kim Moody for much of the following.

[70] Virdee 2015, pp. 26-27, 34-37; Virdee 2018, pp. 15-18

[71] Roediger and Esch 2012, Roediger 2005.

[72] Khalili 2020, p. 185.

[73] Brenner and Brenner 1981, p. 31.

[74] Roediger 2019, p. 68.

[75] Ignatiev 1995, Bernstein 2010.

[76] Wolfinger 2009.

[77] Post 2017.

[78] 2014

[79] Chibber 2017.

[80] Goldfield 2020.

[81] Nelson 2001, Chapters 5-7, demonstrates how the CIO’s acceptance of departmental seniority set the stage for the reproduction of racial divisions among steel workers and other organized industrial workers in the post-war period.

The emergence of a new generation of antiracist activists and theorists seeking to advance an anticapitalist agenda creates a new vantage point of reexamining how racism relates to the logic of capital. This essay explores sources in the work of Marx, twentieth century Marxists, and Frantz Fanon that can provide direction for overcoming the binary of class and race.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

To grasp the Black Dimension is to learn a new language, the language of thought, Black thought. For many, this new language will be difficult because they are hard of hearing. Hard of hearing because they are not used to this type of thought, a language which is both a struggle for freedom and the thought of freedom.

                                                                                  – Raya Dunayevskaya[1]

Marxism’s Contradictory Legacy on Race and Class

Few issues in radical theory are more contentious than the relation of race and class. It remains a largely unsettled one: some claim that prioritising issues of race diverts from building an anti-capitalist alternative, some contend it is inconceivable for such an alternative to arise without doing so, and others adopt positions that do not neatly fall into either view. But given the adage that history does not pose problems that are incapable of being solved, it is worth recalling that Marxists are not exactly new-comers to this debate.

This includes the work of Hubert Harrison, who challenged early twentieth century socialists to prioritise the fight against racism while encouraging the Garvey movement to embrace the class struggle; W.E.B. Du Bois, whose magisterial Black Reconstruction was deeply impacted by his engagement with Marx; Oliver Cromwell Cox, who held that ‘racial exploitation and race prejudice developed among Europeans with the rise of capitalism’[2] in the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and C.L.R. James, who argued for the independent validity of Black freedom struggles while upholding the perspective of proletarian revolution.

Nonetheless, efforts to overcome the binary of race and class have a fraught history.[3] While the U.S. Communist Party did important work in fighting racism, its slavish subservience to Moscow led it to oppose the Harlem and Detroit rebellions of 1943 on the grounds that ‘Negro rights should be considered secondary’ to the war effort. Nor was this an isolated case: the Stalinist denigration of anyone and anything that got in the way of the defence of the USSR led many Blacks to leave the communist movement, from Richard Wright and Harold Cruse to Aimé Césaire and George Padmore. True, some went in the other direction, like Claudia Jones and later Du Bois. But the Stalinists were not the only ones to be put to the test when it came to race: James faced intense opposition within the Trotskyist U.S. Workers’ Party because of its position that ‘Race consciousness is a reactionary doctrine…the general class oppression to which Negroes are subjected is identical with the exploitation of the white workers’.[4]

In the decades that followed, controversies over race and class engulfed virtually every tendency in the Western Left (for better or worse). The Civil Rights, Black Power, Feminist and LGBTQ movements inspired a series of important works on the relation of race, class and gender by such figures as Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the development of whiteness studies by Theodore Allen, Noel Ignatiev, and Alexander Saxton, and writings by Cornell West, Manning Marble, Robin D. K. Kelly, and many others.

The consensus among most Marxists prior to the 1980s was that anti-Black racism arose with the birth of capitalism in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This view has the virtue of countering ahistorical or biological explanations that ignore the economic and political formations responsible for the social construction of race and racism. But it hardly settles the question as to what explains the persistence of anti-Black racismafter the abolition of slavery. Du Bois addressed this in pointing to job competition between white and Black workers as a factor in fostering white racism. But despite recent claims to the contrary, Du Bois was reluctant to commit to monocausal explanations of racism; he was even unconvinced that the ‘psychological’ wage gained by white workers at the expense of Blacks could explain the depth of race hatred that drove many of them to commit lynching and mass murder.[5]

The publication of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism in 1983 marked a kind of watershed: his invocation of an often-neglected Black radical tradition and his discussion of the difficulty many Marxists face in incorporating an anti-racist agenda into a political tradition that prioritises class led many (including Robinson himself) to turn away from Marxism, even as others were inspired to turn anew to figures in the Black Marxist tradition that he discusses. Robinson’s argument that white racism precedes the birth of capitalism by many centuries helps explain this ambiguous legacy:[6] if racism and capitalism are not concomitants, why presume that the abolition of the latter will ever lead to the annulment of the former?

The outstanding decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter addressed this as follows:

Both before and during the post-World War II global anticolonial and antiapartheid uprising […] Marx’s then prophetic-poetic emancipatory project had been, for so long, the only ostensibly ecumenically human emancipatory project around […] The result was that manyof us had thought that what first had to be transformed, was, above all, our present free-market/free-trade mode of capitalist economic production exploitation system into a new socialist mode of production. The idea was that once this was done, everything else would follow [… including] our still ongoing, status-ordered hierarchically structured, world-systemic order of domination/subordination. This change was to automatically follow. It didn’t of course.[7]

Wynter makes an important point. There have been many efforts to create ‘a new socialist mode of production’ by transforming or abolishing the ‘free market’, but it would be hard to argue that they put an end to racial discrimination. Neither the Social Democratic welfare states, which sought to restrain the free market, nor ‘revolutionary’ regimes in the USSR, China or Cuba which got rid of it, can claim to have abrogated discrimination based on race and gender. The history of the past 100 years indicates that there is no assurance that targeting the ills of a market economy based on private ownership of the means of production translates into overcoming racialised ways of seeing and relating to others – especially since those who imbibe the norms of a racist society often includes progressive whites.

It can be argued that neither the Social Democratic nor Stalinist regimes created ‘a new socialist mode of production’ – and if they had, the changes that Wynter refers to would have ‘automatically followed’. But that begs the question – what must be done to create ‘a new socialist mode of production’ if restricting or abolishing ‘our present free-market/free-trade mode’ doesn’t suffice? This question is rarely asked: despite the growth of interest in socialist ideas in recent years, it is still generally taken for granted that ‘socialism’ equals public ownership of property and planned production and/or an enhanced welfare state that ‘fairly’ redistributes surplus value. Achieving this would surely be an advance worth fighting for, but it would not require uprooting the capitalist mode of production. Why then assume that racism would be seriously undermined on the basis of so narrow a vision of socialism?

Wynter’s comment raises the question: do the new means of production create the new humanity, or does the new humanity create the new means of production? If it is the latter, can a new humanity emerge without making the struggle against racism an absolute priority? And if so, how can antiracist perspectives be integrated into a rejuvenated Marxism that targets not merely capitalism’s inequitable forms of distribution but the logic of capital itself?

These questions are by no means alien to today’s social movements: they are called forth by them. This is evident from the massive protests against police abuse and for Black lives following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, which brought over 20 million into the streets in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. What was remarkable was not just the size but theform of the protests. Inspired (and often organised) by Blacks, Latinx, and Native Americans, they weremultiracial and provided a forum for a host of voices – women speaking out against discrimination, immigrants opposing deportation, frontline workers deploring the lack of protection from COVID-19, transgendered activists opposing sexual violence, youth deploying lack of adequate education, etc. Most of all, it reshaped political discourse in the U.S. by bringing long-suppressed demands for police and prison abolition to the forefront of public discussion and debate.

What has played a huge in these developments has been mutual aid, which many assert is crucial in helping to prefigure human relations that point beyond the horizon of capitalism. One activist reports,

While the term ‘mutual aid’ is now used by many leftists as shorthand for (re)distributive activities, there is value in critically thinking through the term. Mutual aid can certainly address communities’ survival needs, but it should serve another purpose, i.e., to undermine the reification of transactional human relations under capitalism. As the desire for capital returns subsumes all aspects of our lives, the very institutions of care which this system relies upon begin to decay. This presents an opportunity for new forms of care-taking institutions to emerge, including those not based in patriarchal social relations.[8]

Another participant in mutual aid work states,

A common slogan amongst community organisers now is ‘mutual aid is solidarity not charity’. Non-profits and the state do not engage in mutual aid because mutual aid is necessarily about working outside the state and is anticapitalist […] Thus, mutual aid, abolition of police and militarism, abolition of capitalism, and decolonisation go hand in hand.^[9]

Advocates of defunding police and prison abolition clearly have a tough road ahead, as witnessed by the pushback against such demands not only from the far-Right and neoliberals but also some sections of the radical Left.[10] Nevertheless, it is clear that those involved in these campaigns make no secret of their hostility to capitalism or that they identify as workers. Yet it is not the general class struggle that motivates them as much as capitalism’s thoroughly racialised nature. Mariama Kaba writes,

As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.[11]

These voices pose a challenge to develop a rejuvenated Marxism that targets not merely capitalism’s forms of distribution but the logic of capital itself. But what might that involve?

Rethinking Marxism in Light of Racial Capitalism

An issue that is repeatedly raised in today’s anti-racist struggles is the notion that people of color have been written out of the social contract that grounds modern society. The expression ‘The Social Contract is Broken!’ has appeared in innumerable posters and graffiti and voiced in street protests and public assemblies. As Kimberly Jones stated in response to criticism of the riots that accompanied some of antiracist protests,

When they say, ‘Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’, we say it’s not ours! We don’t own anything! There’s a social contact that we all have, that if you steal or if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation, but the person who is ‘fixing’ the situation is killing us. So, the social contract is broken! You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets, you broke the contract when for over 400 years we played your game, and built your wealth. They broke the contract.[12]

Such views were was hardly new; the conception that racism exposes the pretentions of the liberal social contract gores back to the work of Charles Mills and others.[13] It is worth re-examining such critiques in light of the challenges they pose to contemporary Marxist theory.

Contractual relations are integral to capitalism – especially wage labour. It takes the form of appearance of a contract.Mutual recognition takes place insofar as each party agrees to formally acknowledge the claims of the other.Such recognition is limited and superficial, since capitalists extend recognition to workers only insofar as they augment profit, while workers extend recognition to capitalists only insofar as they continue to employ them. But the seeminglycontractual nature of wage labour is dispelled when we leave the market and enter the ‘hidden abode’ of production, wherethe despotic plan of capital reigns supreme.

What defines this despotic plan is the domination of ‘dead labour’ over ‘living labour’.  It is personified in the capitalist lording over the worker. But the capitalist is no more a self-acting agent than the worker, since he must bring commodities to market that are produced in accordance with the average amount of time in which it is necessary to do so. If the productive output fails to adhere to this time differential, he will fail to match the rate of profit of his competitors and risk being forced out of business. The despotic plan of capital, whichappears as the domination of the capitalist over the worker, turns out to be governed by animpersonal force,abstract universal labor time.

What grounds and makes possible the ‘free market’ is therefore despotism in which individuals are subjected to a time-determination over which they have no control. Simply altering the terms of the contract (as by obtaining higher wages or a modification of working conditions), while surely beneficial, does not by itself point toward an exit from capitalism. The annulment of ‘market anarchy’ leads to anew society only if freely-associated relations are established in and outside the workplace in which ‘time becomes the space for human development’.[14] To be sure, the law of value is enforced by the personifications of capital – but they need not be private owners of labour power; state functionaries can perform the task as well. Marx’s critique of class society goes further than targeting property forms and exchange relations because his critique of alienated labour goes further than the economic structure of society. It targets itshuman relations.

To be sure, the Communist Manifesto states, ‘the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property’.[15] Abolishing bourgeois property right is the immediate object of critique since it is the precondition for a free association of the producers. However, an abolition of private property that leaves alienated labour intact brings forth not a new mode of production but a different variant of capitalism. Marx attacked the ‘crude and unthinking communists’ of his day because their ‘community is only a community oflabour, and equality ofwages paid out by communal capital – by thecommunity as the universal capitalist’.[16] This identification of the community as the ‘universal’ or ‘abstract capitalist’,[17]following the elimination of individual capitalists is a remarkable anticipation of twentieth-century Social Democracy and Stalinism, as well as of non-statist cooperatives that fail tothoroughly transform alienated labour. Marx contends, ‘The relationship of the worker to labour creates the relation of it to the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour).Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, ofalienated labour, of the external relation of the workers to nature and to himself’.[18]

What holds for property is true of the ‘free’ market. Marx opposed the modern market economy because the condition of its possibility is a peculiar form of social labour.Concrete products of labour can be universally exchanged only if they contain a commensurate substance that is itself not concrete. This is not supplied by ‘labour,’ but by a specific kind of labour –abstract labour. Each moment of laboring involves performingconcrete, differentiated tasks, but in capitalism labor has adual character, since value is generated by physiological activity that assumes anabstract form in conforming to socially necessary labor time. The labor time that counts as socially necessary constantly shifts in response to contingencies, such as technological innovations that enable more to be made in less time. This is the basis of thedictatorship of capital, which defines even the most ‘democratic’ of capitalisms. As Marx put it, ‘The various proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement is established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’.[19]

It may seem that this has nothing to do with race. It may even appear that Marx’s theory of value contravenes any notion that race or racism is integral to the logic of capital, since the latter effaces difference and contingency in favor of abstraction and homogenisation. For example, while David Roediger takes issue with the claim of David Harvey and others that ‘race sits outside of the logic of capital’, he contends that Marx’s Capital falls short of ‘placing racial and national division within as well as outside’ its logic.[20] This does not mean that Roediger (and others who make similar criticisms) denies that Marx had important things to say about the connection between racism and capitalism. Like earlier twentieth-century Marxists, he highlights the importance of the section on ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ at the end of Capital, in which Marx calls ‘the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of Black skins’ one of the ‘chief moments of primitive accumulation’ of capital.[21] However, it is one thing to make the empirical claim (hardly controversial among most Marxists[22]) that the historical reflections found in the final section ofCapital ties the birth of capitalism to the racism that defined the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and quite another to demonstrate that the delineation of the  value-theoretic categories in its earlier parts account for racial difference. The standard narrative – ranging from postcolonial theorists to Marxist capital-logic and value-form theorists – is that Marx’s presentation of the law of value inCapital completely abstracts from such concrete issues as race or gender.[23] Such claims cannot be dismissed out of hand; after all, the opening chapters of Volume One of Capital are written at a high level of abstraction. Yet if such claims are left unchallenged, it is hard to see how a new generation of antiracist activists and theorists will feel impelled to discover the wealth of insights found for today in Marx’s critique of political economy.

However, if instead of remaining at the phenomenal level of property forms and market relations Capital is approached in terms of its delineation of the time-determination that grounds capitalism, the relation between racism and the logic of capital appears in a different light. Central to this is chapter 10 of Volume One ofCapital on ‘The Working Day.’ Here we find Marx’s famous declaration, ‘Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’[24] The statement has been heralded by many Marxists as a sign of Marx’s sensitivity to anti-Black racism while being downplayed by critics of Marxism as a rhetorical flourish that is undermined by his privileging the industrial proletariat as the ‘universal’ class that leads everyone else to liberation. What tends to be overlooked by many on either side of the debate is that the chapter on the Working Day was not composed until 1866, shortly before the publication of Volume One; no version of it appears in the earlier drafts of Capital.[25] This indicates that the impact of the U.S. Civil War, climaxed by Blacks fleeing the plantations in what Du Bois called nothing less than a ‘mass general strike’,[26] finally led Marx to devote a chapter of his greatest theoretical work to the question ‘when does my working day begin and when does it end?’

In documenting that Marx restructured Capital on the basis of the impact of the events during in the U.S. during the Civil War, Dunayevskaya noted,

It sounds fantastic to say that until 1866 Marx had not worked out the seventy pages on the Working Day […] That Ricardo didn’t concern himself with the working day is understandable because he evaded the whole problem of the origin of surplus value. That the socialists, from the utopians through Proudhon and Lassalle, were not weighted down by this problem is explained easily enough since they were too busy with their plans to ever study the real workers’ movement. But for Marx, who had never once taken his eyes off the proletarian movement, not to have a section on the Working Day in his major theoretical work seems incomprehensible.[27]

Marx himself argued that ‘so long as the determination of value by working time is itself left “undetermined”, as it is with Ricardo, it does not make people shaky. But as soon as it is brought exactly into connection with the working day and its variations, a very unpleasant new light dawns upon them’.[28] Marx explicitly states in chapter 10 that the freedom struggles of former Black slaves is such a new stage in the fight for freedom that it inspired white workers to take up the fight for an eight-hour workday, as witnessed by the formation of the General Congress of Labour in August 1866 in Baltimore. It wasn’t the struggles of the industrial proletariat that paved the way for the emancipation of Black slaves; on the contrary, it was the self-activity of former Black slaves that breathed new life into a previously dormant class struggle.[29]

This had Marx’s ear, and it led him to incorporate issues of race and racism into his critique of capital on a level that is not found in his earlier work.[30] He calls attention to,

Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind […] in its blind and measureless drive [capital] usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body…. Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labor power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labor power that it can set into motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labor power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility’.[31]

A page later he writes,

It is accordingly a maxim of slave management, in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is in then tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that Negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African race.[32]

Marx here poses race-based slavery in the Americas as internal to the dynamics of capital accumulation, which hinges on extracting the greatest amount of surplus value in the fewest hours of time. And he is indeed referring to surplusvalue – not simply a surplusproduct of use-values, since he invokes ‘annual profits’ based on ‘the capital of plantations.’ Moreover, Marx infers that the American system of race-based slavey is not an archaic hangover of a precapitalist past that impedes the development of a ‘higher’ and ‘more efficient’ mode of production, since he calls it ‘the most effective economy’ when it comes to maximising profits. If this is often overlooked, it is because it is easy to conflate Marx’s discussion of precapitalist slave modes of production – in which labour power is not commodified and production is aimed at augmenting use-values instead of exchange value – with the form assumed by slavery in the Americas, which was integral to the accumulation of capital based on a global division of labor.

This conflation defines an otherwise engaging essay by Walter Johnson, in which he asks, ‘What does Marx say about capitalism and slavery? – there can only be on answer: slavery in Marx is not properly speaking, “capitalist”’.[33] Johnson invokes as his authority the outdated and much criticised work of Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who tended to conflate race-based slavery in the Americas with generic slave modes of production.[34] Yet in the 1863-64 draft of Capital – by no accident penned in the midst of the U.S. Civil War – Marx writes,

In the second type of colonies – plantations – where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market, the capitalist mode of production exists, although only in a formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes precludes free wage-labour, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists. The method of production which they introduce has not arisen out of slavery but is grafted on to it. In this case the same person is capitalist and landowner. And the elemental existence of the land confronting capital and labour does not offer any resistance to capital investment, hence none to the competition between capitals.’[35]

Johnson rightly asks, ‘If slavery was not capitalist how do we explain its commercial character’.[36] Clearly, if American slavery was not capitalist we could not account for its commercial character. But Marx never denied that capitalism existed prior to industrial capitalism, even though the latter was the focus of his critique.[37] The ‘excrescence of money changers and cotton factors in southern cities who yearly handled millions and millions of pounds of foreign exchange’ and ‘the thriving slave markets at the centre of their cities where prices tracked those that were being paid for cotton thousands of miles away’,[38] which Johnson says demonstrates the commercial character of U.S. slavery, did not signify for Marx (unlike Fox-Genovese) that U.S. slavery was exogenous to capitalism. To be sure, there is no capital without wage labour, and no wage labour without capital; a society exclusively defined by slave labour is not and cannot be capitalist. However, nothing prevents slave labour, especially in its most racialised forms, from augmenting capital in a society whose ‘general creative basis’[39] is wage labour. Roman slavery could neither create nor augment capital because the conditions of generalised wage labour did not exist. American slavery could and did augment capital since it operated in the context of a capitalist world market in which wage labour generally prevailed as its ‘creative basis’.[40] The same goes for racialised forms of violent social control that followed the end of chattel slavery.

Curiously, neither critics of Marxism such as Johnson, nor Marxists like Roediger – both of which have done vital work in recording and analysing the pivotal role played by racial classification and differentiation in the development of U.S. society – single out that Marx restructured Capital on the basis of Black freedom struggles during the Civil War which informed the writing of the chapter on the Working Day. Could this result from not considering the chapter as part of the essence of Marx’s analysis of capital? But if so, why not? Why consider Marx’s effort to theorise from the standpoint of the lived experience of the worker who lacks ‘time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind’ to be less important than his more ‘abstract’ discussion of the relative and equivalent forms of value, the relation surplus value and profit, and the difference between absolute and differential ground rent? If Marxism is a theory of liberation – and what is it if it is not – thenCapital’s most outstanding characteristic is that Marx analyses the most abstract forms of domination without taking his fingers off of the pulse of human relations.[41]

The Czech Marxist Humanist Karel Kosik spoke to this when he stated that Marxism is not merely a theory of class struggle but a ‘philosophy of everyday life, a philosophy ofordinary relationships among people […] It not only analyses the movements of large historical entities, such as classes and nations, but also provides answers to the individual’s questions – about the meaning of life, and the contents and prospects of his efforts’.[42] And what is more meaningful to human life than whether or not we have control of our time? Kosik writes, ‘Man knows his mortality only because he organises time, on the basis of labor as objective doing and as the process of forming socio-human reality. Without this objective doing in which man organises time into a future, a present, and a past, man could not know his totality’.[43] Kosik held that achieving the socialisation of the means of production requires developing new human capacities attained in the struggle against dehumanisation. Du Bois and others in the Black radical tradition were attentive to such a notion in singling out the political and philosophical significance of the ‘simple’ act of tens of thousands of Black slaves walking off the plantations in the 1860s.

Yet the question remains – can the defining concepts of Marx’s theory of value, especially the ever-increasing domination of concrete labor by abstract labor, account for social differentiations that are integral to racial oppression? Roediger doubts that it can, based on Lisa Lowe’s view that, ‘In the U.S., capital has maximised its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely through the social productions of difference […] marked by race, nation, geographical regions, and gender.’[44] Roediger concludes from this (as does Michael Lebowitz) that ‘divisions among the working class, specifically racism and sexism, do not appear as part of the essence of capital in Marx’s Capital’.[45] But this appears to rest on a misunderstanding of the concept of abstract labor. What ‘makes labor abstract’ is adhering to socially necessary time: labor becomes ‘homogenous’ insofar as it conforms to a universal time determination, as represented by the ticking of the factory clock. And it is precisely this which accentuates differences between workers: some adhere to the average, others do not; the latter are sooner or later dispensed with and/or deprived of the benefits that others possess, since in capital’s view any hour of labor performed in excess of the social average (which is communicated to the agents of social production through the laws of competition) creates no value. There are many reasons why some enterprises conform to the dictates of socially necessary labor time better than others: it could be the quantity and quality of labor-saving devices, the skill or education of the workers, the level of social cohesion among workers that enables them to resist overwork and speed-up, etc. Although an array of contingencies determines whether or not enterprises follow the law of value, they are compelled to follow this singular law.

Race and gender play a critical role in this. If making use of socially-inscribed differences can pump out greater output in less relative units of time, so much the better from capital’s standpoint. The utilisation and reproduction of difference poses no barrier to the homogenising power of abstract labor, so long as they meet the requirements of value production. It is one reason that the majority of factory workers in the world today are young women – gender discrimination tends to lower wage rates while expending the bodies and lives of young women boosts profit rates. It is also why capital sees to it that Blacks are the last hired and first fired – racial discrimination acts as a disciplinary agent in forcing greater output from the most marginalised while enabling many white workers to feel relatively privileged even as they come under increasing pressure from capital’s time constraints. Capital relies no less on the reproduction of national and ethnic difference – as in employing immigrant workers speaking over a dozen different languages in a single enterprise (as in many meatpacking plants in the U.S.) in order to make it harder for them to come together to fight for better conditions. There is nothing in Marx’s concept of abstract labor that suggests that all concrete laboring activities become the same or that social differentiations become washed away. On the contrary, abstract labor in Marx’s theory as well as in life is productive of difference. In this sense, Roediger is correct in writing, ‘we have too often forgotten [John R.] Common’s suggestion that the hurrying and pushing could be chronically infected by playing races against each other.’[46] We need only add that this ‘hurrying and pushing’ is part and parcel of the disciplinary power of socially necessary labor time, which serves as the inner core of Marx’s theory of value and surplus value.

Claims that Marx’s concept of abstract labor fails to account for racial differentiation may be due, in part, to a passage in the Communist Manifesto that states with the progressive development of capitalism ‘national differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing […] the supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still further’.[47] This naïve modernist optimism was clearly unjustified, as Marx himself came to realise in subsequent years as he paid greater attention to the persistence of national antagonisms, both in Europe and the Americas.[48] Yet his discussion of this issue in the Manifesto has nothing to do with the concept of abstract labor, which he did not even begin to formulate until a decade later.

To be sure, the chapter on the Working Day has a limited scope – it comes under the discussion of absolute surplus value. Hence, the struggles for a shorter working day involve ‘demand[ing] the value of my commodity;[49] they do not in and of themselves lead to the abolition of commodity production. But since bringing ‘the productive process under their common control by their associated reason’ depends upon workers having the time for ‘intellectual development [and] sociable intercourse’, for Marx struggles over the working day are on a much higher level than ‘the pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’.[50]

This is not to suggest that Marx’s delineation of the logic of capital does our work for us: he only occasionally makes explicit the relation of race and gender to capital accumulation and never developed a specifically Marxian theory of racialisation. Doing so is a task that falls to our generation. Hence, the critical issue is not what Marx said at a certain point of time as much as whether the concepts found in his critique of the capitalist mode of production can help make sense of the realities of our time – if, that is, we take the trouble of thinking them out to their logical conclusion. The task is hardly facilitated by thea priori assumption that concepts like abstract labor and socially necessary labor time efface difference and contingency.[51]

In critiquing the dehumanisation involved in being subjected to an abstract time determination, Marx’s critique of political economy takes issue with the form of social praxis which defines modern life. This is what enables his body of thought, when ‘stretched’ to deal with the realities of our time, to address the dialectical relation between race and class. As Sekyi-Otu argues,

Marx’s call for the transcendence of alienation would therefore not call for the liberation of humanity from time […] as Herbert Marcuse once envisioned, but the liberationof time, ‘time set free’, is the only goal consistent with Marx’s social ontology […] Would Fanon question the prominence here assigned to time in the poetics of human existence? Quite likely not’.[52]

Indeed! As Fanon himself put it, ‘every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time’.[53]

Race, Class and Recognition Today

The work of Frantz Fanon continues to be a beacon because of the depth of his grasp of the psychological as well as economic-political impact of racism and colonialism.[54] This is evident from his discussion of the ‘zone of non-being’ that grounds his critical encounter with Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness in Black Skin, White Masks. It has much to say to efforts to pose an alternative to the racist social contract that defines much of modern life.

Elsewhere I have detailed Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s so-called ‘master/slave’ dialectic in Black Skin, White Masks.[55] ‘So-called’, since strictly speaking there is no ‘master/slave’ dialectic in Hegel. The German terms are Herrschaft andKnechtschaft, which translate as Lordship and Bondage; this is how it is rendered in most English translations of thePhenomenology of Spirit (the German term for slave,Sklave, appears nowhere in the book).[56] It became known as ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’ due to the French translation by Jean Hyppolite, which rendered Herr andKnecht[57] as ‘maître’ and ‘esclave’. Alexandre Kojève, a major influence in post-war French thought, historicised this ‘master/slave’ dialectic and claimed it as the central theme of Hegel’sPhenomenology as a whole. His interpretation has been widely challenged,[58] since for Hegel ‘Lordship and Bondage’ refers to a particular stage of self-consciousness in which one side gains superiority over the other in a battle for recognition. It does not refer to a stage of actual history, let alone the slavery of his time. This is no scholastic matter: if Hegel is referring to actual masters and slaves, the fact he never mentionsBlack slavery would suggest that his racist writing of Africans out of history in hisPhilosophy of History[59] defines his delineation of the stages of consciousness in the Phenomenology. Achille Mbembe reads Hegel along these lines:

Hegel’s reasoning proceeds as follows: my life is particularity; my particularity is totality; my totality is consciousness; and my consciousness is life. Self-consciousness, the knowing of itself, self-identity: all this is raised up to the status of ‘native realm of truth’. Difference has no being, or, if it has, then only as the reverse of everything that I am, as error, folly – in short, the ‘objective negative’. All that counts is the motionless tautology of ‘I am I’.^[60]

The ‘my’ here obviously refers to the standpoint of whites. But this hardly does justice to Hegel’s text. Dialectical movement in Hegel proceeds through difference, not at its expense; identity for Hegel is the identity of identity and non-identity. The notion that ‘my consciousness is the totality of consciousness’ is refuted from the initial chapter on sense-certainty, which shows that apprehension of particulars depends upon universal categories that are not reducible to the individual. And ‘the motionless tautology of ‘I am I’ is not Hegel’s position but rather Fichte’s, which is critiqued throughout thePhenomenology.

There is no question of Hegel’s racism and Eurocentrism: his banishing of Africa from history expresses a racist mindset that places Europe at the apex of human development.[61] But it is not his delineation of the stages of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit that explains his racism, but rather his uncritical acceptance of racist stereotypes which prevents him from positing Black experience and reason as part of its dialectical movement.[62]

Fanon did not read German, so he accessed the Phenomenology through the lens provided by Hyppolite and Kojève. But unlike Kojève, he did not try to apply the ‘master/slave’ dialectic to contemporary realities. On the contrary, he denied any such application.[63] This is because Hegel asserts that the bondsman obtains a ‘mind of his own’ in the struggle for recognition. In contrast, Fanon holds that in the real world of racial capitalism no such recognition is granted to people of color. As a result, the Black slave ‘is less independent than the Hegelian slave… Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object’.[64]

Fanon’s critique of Hegel’s ‘master/slave’ dialectic did not lead him to reject Hegel tout court. At several junctures hedefends Hegel against Jean-Paul Sartre, who called the anti-racist struggle a ‘minor term’ that must eventually give way to the ‘universal’ class struggle. Fanon writes, ‘For once this friend, this born Hegelian, had forgotten that consciousness needs to lose itself in the might of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness’.[65] Despite Fanon’s critique of Hegel, he affirms Hegel’s dialectical conception that ‘negativity draws its value from a virtually substantial absoluity’.[66] Much like Marx, Fanon attacks Hegel’s failure to affirm the subjective forces that can uproot alienation while adhering to Hegel’s notion that freedom is attained through a dialectic of negativity.

When Hegel is read through the eyes of Fanon, an often-overlooked aspect of Hegel comes to light – namely, no sooner does Hegel say the bondsman gains ‘a mind of his own’ than he says this constitutes ‘only stubbornness’ since it has not overcome the gap between its subjectivity and an unfree objective world.[67]Misrecognition, not recognition, is the outcome of the dialectic of self-consciousness. Genuine recognition onlybegins to be reached much later in thePhenomenology, in the section ‘Spirit Certain of Itself’.

Fanon did not comment further on the Phenomenology, so it is unclear how familiar he was with the rest of the book. But his work after the publication ofBlack Skin, White Masks has some fascinating parallels with later parts of thePhenomenology. In ‘Spirit Certain of itself’, Hegel goes beyond an encounter between two individual self-consciousnesses by posing recognition in terms of apolitical community based on asocial contract. Through the latter, the universal becomes united with individual existence. In entering into contract, I ‘externalise’ myself in relation to others, and thereby ‘establish’ myself as an objective being.

Hegel proceeds to show that what binds the individual to the political community is confession. Catherine Malabou writes, “Confession, according to Hegel, is nothing private, secluded from the political sphere. On the contrary, it is a political achievement. Confession is the postcontractual expression of the will.”[68] Although I accept the social contract, the general will confronts me as an external imposition. This produces a sense of unease which is part of the alienation that defines modern life. Malabou adds, “In modern society…the individual does not recognise itself in the community that it is nevertheless supposed to have wanted. She isnonrecognisedby her own recognition; she is outside herself, in an alien spirit. The individual is ‘alienated from itself.’”[69] Confession is way to resolve this contradiction. Confessing to a transgression of the social contract and asking forgiveness for doing so reconciles the individual to the spiritual community. Recognition now seems possible.[70] However, what happens if you are not considered part of the social contract to begin with? If that is the case, you do not exist, strictly speaking, as a social being: you are a non-person, who inhabits a ‘zone of nonbeing’.

Hegel’s discussion may seem to have little to do with Fanon – and even less with the relation between race and class. Nevertheless, in TheWretched of the Earth, Fanon writes,

The question of truth must also be taken into consideration. For the people, only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth. No absolute truth, no discourse on the transparency of the soul can erode this position. In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonised responds with a lie. Behavior toward fellow nationalists is open and honest, but strained and indecipherable toward the colonists. Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime.[71]

The lie of the colonial situation is the claim to treat the colonised as human by ‘including them in civilisation’, even though the colonised knows they are not treated that way at all. Yet no confession or guilt is expressed on the part of the colonised: they respond to the lie of the colonist with one of their own. In a psychiatric paper that has recently become available, ‘Conducts of Confession in North Africa’, Fanon explores why victims of colonialism often refuse to confess to crimes they are guilty of. The reason, he says, is that confession depends on a contractual relation – which is absent in a colonial context. He writes, “I confess as a man and am sincere. I also confess as a citizen and I validate the social contract.”[72] Confession depends upon prior recognition: “There can be no reintegration if here has been no integration.”[73] In remaining silent and refusing to confess, it seems that the colonised submits to authority, but they are actually expressing resistance to a society that leaves them out of the social contract.[74]

Those who seek to gain recognition by refraining from such resistance fall victim to an inferiority complex – expressed in the colonised trying to ‘become white’. But since this proves ultimately futile, the only way out is to tarry with the negativity inherent in racial discrimination by reaching for what Fanon called a ‘new Humanism’.[75] Since victims of racism have weaker ties to juridical relations, they can go beyond calls for a fairer distribution of the products of labour by questioning the dehumanised character of life itself. Working-class Blacksexperience dehumanisation in its starkest form and therefore have less of a stake in its continuance.[76] In this spirit, Fanon addressed himself to the ‘wretched of the earth’ who truly have nothing to lose but their chains.

This does not mean that he overlooked class.[77] He states in another psychiatric paper,

Labour was conceived as forced labor in the colonies, and even if there is no whipping, the colonial situation itself is a whipping: what the colonised does nothing is normal, since labor, for him, leads to nothing. Labour must be recovered as the humanisation of man. Man, when he throws himself into work, fecundates nature, but he fecundates himself also.[78]