Rethinking Racial Capitalism

Questions of Reproduction and Survival

By Gargi Bhattacharyya

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Gargi Bhattacharyya
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-885-8

Contents

Introduction: Ten Theses on Racial Capitalism, ix,
1 Beginning, 1,
2 Social Reproduction: Gender, Racism, Nature, 39,
3 Histories of Violence, Legacies of Trauma, 71,
4 What Racial Capitalism Is and What It Is Not, 101,
5 Territory and Borders, Racial Capitalism and Sovereignty in Crisis, 125,
6 Consumption and Indebtedness, 151,
7 Ending: On Not Being Part of the Industrial Reserve Army, 177,
Bibliography, 185,
Index, 205,
About the Author, 207,

CHAPTER 1

Beginning

WHAT RACIAL CAPITALISM IS

Imagine a house with many storeys — an attic and a cellar, several annexes that have no direct connections, main rooms filled with comfort and a maze of unmappable corridors leading to all sorts of barely remembered wings, snugs and the occasional route outside to a seemingly isolated out-house. There are people in each part of the house and sometimes some of them meet. But mostly their movements are shaped by the place in which they find themselves, and who they see and who they can be is delimited by the strange geography of the house. Racial capitalism is this kind of story. It is a story about imagining economic formations as demarcating the relations and walls between different groups of human beings. It is also a story about imaging who enters which rooms and how. One kind of narrative suggests that everyone will get into the living room eventually — they may take different journeys and come at different paces, but all the convoluted routes will lead to the living room in the end.

Others might suggest that the house will grow other new and different living rooms — separate from the original geography of the house but providing a similar experience of comfort and safety for the populations in those wings of the building.

Both accounts — and I would say that these have been the dominant accounts for some time — assume that occupation of the/a living room is achievable by all and is a marker of progress and enhanced material wellbeing.

This work begins from the belief that much of the world has never and will never enter that particular form of living room comfort and that this exclusion or expulsion is no accident. The integrity of the building demands that different groups remain in their separate wings and such differentiations are important for the maintenance of the building and its lovely main living room.

WHY 'RACIAL' CAPITALISM?

Using the framing of the racial risks perpetuating the illusion that there is a racial to name, to describe, to analyse. For projects seeking to chart continuities across time and space, just trying to tell the story of the place of race can seem like an argument for the underlying reality of race as the eternal truth of human existence. I try to use race to indicate a mode of social organisation, the mode that categorises with unpassable boundaries. Whereas some categorisation points to activity or location or performance, and may operate as fixing in ways just as troubling, race is the mode of categorisation that references the body, nature, an underlying and unchangeable essence that signals unpassable difference. How do such fictions of embodied otherness continue to play out in the economic formations of a capitalism that seeks to reduce us all to opportunities for value extraction?

IN WHICH WE CONFRONT OUR DOUBTS ABOUT THE WHOLE PROJECT

This work began its life as a response to the increasing confusion around the relationship between race and class that seemed to be filling both popular and academic discussion (for a UK-focused corrective to some central misapprehensions, see Shaheen and Khan, 2017; for a very informative and often funny account of these tensions in academic and activist circles in the United States, see Roediger, 2017). These discussions can be characterised by the reduction of both race and class to aspects of identity (which, of course, they are but not to the exclusion of all else) and the narrowing of the debate about race and class into a battle between competing affiliations and, sometimes, oppressions. As an approach, this has been one that offers almost no insight into what race or class do or how what they do gets done.

This work is an attempt to begin the discussion from a different starting point, in the hope that this other route will allow a different kind of engagement and the possibility of more productive interchange between those affiliated to an analysis of race and those affiliated to an analysis of class. It is also an attempt to think about what capitalism does to human and other life in our time and how we might be touched and positioned differently by its workings.

This, then, is what I set out to do — and with the very best of intentions. And yet, as the project has gone on, I have felt increasingly doubtful. The claim of the title seems too grandiose and far too certain. So let it be settled from the outset. There is no metatheory to transfer between any and all locations here. No master idea conjured up to challenge the great fathers of social theory. Despite the connotations of discussing 'capitalism', this is not a work of theory at all. Instead I have attempted the more modest but still labour-intensive task of description. If we want to understand the many and varied practices that are undertaken in the name of capitalism, then the attempt to describe what is happening is an important step in this process. The attention that is required to really try to register what is happening — before even any attempt to enquire about why and how things happen — is an underrated aspect of intellectual labour. As time goes on, I have become more convinced that the will to describe is an honourable endeavour and one that underlies all other learning.

So — lower your expectations accordingly. There will be no blueprint for the coming revolution here. If I possessed such a thing I would not be wasting my time in the lonely work of scholarship. What I can offer is a series of stories about capitalism in which I seek to persuade you that the descriptor 'racial' adds to our shared knowledge about this beast.

A DETOUR

Well, of course I want to lower your expectations. The claim to illuminate the workings of capitalism has been made before and only the most foolhardy would seek to better that telling. But, also, and as with all story-tellers, I lied. I may not be able to offer a blueprint, but I hope most sincerely that you, dear reader, will discern the path to freedom and that this book will be among the maps that you consult. Because there is no point in writing about capitalism unless your hope is that it can and will be overthrown. And there can be no hope of momentous and freeing change unless we learn somehow to see each other more clearly. The fractious and often circular interchanges about race and class seem to disrupt the possibility of mutual recognition. Not always, to be fair, but too often. The leap into abstraction, even this descriptive abstraction that I offer, suggests a way of thinking of our relation to each other. Understanding more clearly the manners in which capitalism divides and differentiates us might be a helpful step towards charting our interconnectedness despite a lack of literal commonality. A way of thinking about...