Abstract
“Racial capitalism” has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital—usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration—and framework—from Cedric Robinson’s influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of “racial capitalism” as a theoretical project. First, the “racial capitalism” literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by “race” or “capitalism.” Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson’s insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the “forensics of capital” to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson’s concept of “social death.”
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Notes
See Michael Ralph, Treasury of Weary Souls, www.treasuryofwearysouls.com, the most comprehensive ledger of insured slaves.
Ralph (2017) discusses an antebellum explosion at a Virginia coal mine that reveals a similar paradox: the enslaved people who died were insured and thus more valuable, in monetary terms, than the free white workers who died (and who did not even have life insurance). Meanwhile, the names of the white workers were printed in newspapers but not the enslaved workers (who were legally property).
“[T]he legacy of slave capitalism and capitalist slavery and enduring interactions of race and capital, what Robinson has termed ‘racial capitalism’” (Singh 2017, p. 52).
Johnson would appear to summon the approach we define as “forensics of capital” (Ralph 2015, as developed from Pietz 2001) by interrogating “several riverworld commonplaces,” most notably the notion that “poor whites’ lives, Irish lives, German lives, or simply strangers’ lives were somehow worth less than enslaved lives, because no one got paid for them” (Johnson 2013, p. 115).
For Johnson (2013, 215), plantation punishments left enslaved people “bloody and broken.” “The lives of enslaved people were,” in his words, “limited, shaped, even determined by their enslavement” (Johnson 2013, 217) (his emphasis, our italics). Even when enslaved people were granted clothing and shelter, Johnson (2013, 219) maintains a perverse faith in the “limited capacity of human beings to endure pain” that “served the slaveholder as a sort of physiological perimeter”:
The parsimonious rationing of shoes, coats, blankets defined a deeper disciplinary economy, a sort of calculated disability limiting the enhancement of bare life… Indeed, we might think of slaveholders’ power over their slaves as reaching into the fabric of those very bodies—as characterizing the embodied condition of enslaved humanity.
Worse yet, the “disability” of the enslaved buts up against the heightened efficacy of slaveholders (Johnson 2013, p. 221):
[T]he transformation of the [agro-capitalist] landscape imposed a corresponding set of transformations on the human beings who populated it, conferring a sort of supersensory power on slaveholders….
When asked why he put himself in a circumstance he describes as slavery, Wilderson says, “I don’t think it’s a fair question because the question implies that, knowing what I know, I can actually change my life an essential way” (Wilderson 2015).
Ed Baptist (2014, p. xxiv) claims, “Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully” in the “system of slave trading” that planters had erected in the United States “by the mid-1820s”:
So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors?
“Or,” Baptist asks, “would the body [of the deceased slave] live and rise?” without even invoking the plantation archetype of the Haitian zonbi as a critical commentary on the mind-numbing work of slave labor.
Fred Moten (2017) joins this discourse on “zombies” to one about “monsters”: “Having exposed the brutalities of racial capitalism, Saidiya Hartman and Cedric Robinson also let us know that there is an error, a miscalculation, in the terror of enjoyment’s vicious economy. It’s like we have to enjoy all monsters in order to destroy all monsters.” Elsewhere, Moten (2018) asks:
But what if we remember not to forget that the black man is not? Any more than the snowman? […] blackness is older than Africa, older than its diaspora, older than racial slavery, older than its beginning, older than its name or its submission to the operation of naming. It is the anarchic principle that calls ordinary nominalization into being and, therefore, into question; it is the subjunctive, substantive, anticipatory accompaniment of every eviscerative indication. Does racial slavery give blackness its name or does it serve to solidify and disseminate an ongoing naming? Who is the agent, and what is the context, of that naming? These are questions concerning the natural history of racial capitalism, as Robinson theorizes, and of antinomian race war, as Foucault theorizes it. Both theorizations require us to consider the possibility that the history and historicity of blackness is underived from the generally acknowledged temporal, geography, and psychoeconomic origin Wagner demarcates wherein (b)lackness begins with an exchange to which one is not a party, in a state of which one is not a citizen.
Moten continues, “The development of the nation and its units is emergence into the antisociality of racial capitalism, which is predicated upon a metaphysics of static and state-sanctioned completeness that Robinson describes as ‘the terms of order,’” though it should be noted that Robinson construed his approach to “racial capitalism” as an “anthropology of Marxism.”
Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously explained his decision to pursue a PhD in Anthropology rather than History—despite having written the first ever history of the Haitian Revolution in kréyol, Ti difé boulé sou istwa Ayiti [A Small Fire Burning on Haitian History], while he was an undergraduate—by explaining that Anthropology was the only discipline to interrogate Western notions of evidence. For Trouillot, what historians and anthropologists treat as data is the same: historicity. The only meaningful distinctions between the disciplines thus stem from how scholars periodize and whether they “interrogate” evidence. Historicity is concerned with how people inscribe their understanding in the world around them, in which case the project of anthropology is to explore the discrepancy between how people narrate the world and how institutions organize it (Ralph 2018a). But, for neither Robinson nor Trouillot is “blackness” a “metaphysics” that is “underived from history and historicity.” It is one thing for enslaved people, like Hannah Crafts (2002) to use gothic imagery in narrating enslavement, or for Toni Morrison (1987) to draw upon Afrodiasporic ritual tropes and concepts to theorize the horrors of antebellum violence. It is quite another for scholars making an ostensible argument about what slavery and its aftermath are like to figure African American subjectivity as debilitated or disfigured.
Published one year after Slavery as Social Death, Cedric Robinson’s (1983) Black Marxism builds on this insight concerning the autonomy of Africa and Afrodiasporic peoples. Like Patterson, Robinson situates the economic and political transformations that defined the Transatlantic slave trade in the social and economic transformations of the medieval period. This approach prepares Robinson to explain how strategies for gaining or inhibiting access to capital in what was eventually called Europe became the basis for forms of racial difference in the age of the Transatlantic slave trade and beyond. Robinson stresses that political organization structured access to capital long before the age of nation-states. Hence his insightful discussion of the way that Italian city-states financed excursions before formal systems of lending and credit were created in the North Atlantic. Perhaps most powerfully, Black Marxism insists that peoples who would ultimately be kidnapped, coerced, and trapped in exploitative labor regimes have developed their own forms of critique and their own social movements to identify and attack injustices. More specifically, Robinson argues persuasively that people of Africa and African diasporas have always nurtured their own concerns, projects, and priorities when it comes to the question of capital—that they have developed compelling ways to theorize and engage in economic and political transformation that are not merely derivative. Cedric Robinson distills this critical approach as the “Black Radical Tradition”; “racial capitalism” is his term for the complicated predicament they sought to navigate. “Capital and racism” for Robinson (1983, p. xiii) “did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”
In referring to “violent structures of slavery, anti-black racism, virulent sexism, and disposability,” Saidiya Hartman (2016, p. 171) notes the “forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism.”
Singh (2017,p. 41) worries about a “tendency in Marxist thought to think of slavery as capitalism’s antecedent.”
Ruth Gilmore (2017) insists that “Capitalism” is “never not racial.” She nonetheless provides a specific genealogy for “Racial Capitalism”:
Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-motion, field factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-making monarchs….
For Gilmore, “racial capitalism” would seem to begin in the “Old World” as a byproduct of “capitalism” as she refers to “racial capitalism’s dramatically scaled cycles of place-making—including all of chattel slavery, imperialism, settler colonialism, resource extraction, infrastructural coordination, urban industrialization, regional development, and the financialization of everything.”
“In 1819, while considering the role of enslaved women on plantations, Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘It is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration.’” From Jennifer Morgan’s perspective, “Jefferson’s words articulated a crucial expression of racial capitalism in a time and place that predate the rise of the antebellum plantation economy on which much of our critical attention to the links between slavery and capitalism attends” (Morgan 2018, p. 14; emphasis ours). Singh (2017, pp. 42–43) argues that “Afro-pessimism” effectively precludes “an understanding of slavery tied to the development of capitalism,” suggesting that these two systems are distinct yet related (their emphasis, our italics).
In a 2018 New Dawn podcast interview with Michael Dawson, Destin Jenkins explains how “the built environment has become a critical site for the intersections of race and capitalism,” so masterfully, it is hard to imagine why it should not be considered the prevailing framework for thinking about how capital works in urban contexts rather than a specific intervention concerning the burgeoning sub-field of “racial capitalism” (which implies it is permissible to study capitalism without attention to race). Jenkins’s discussion of the way that social difference brokers access to capital—which then shapes access to property, intergenerational wealth, and investment opportunities—is so illuminating it is worth quoting at length:
The thesis is what I call the triple profitability of urban racial capitalism: racial capital derived from racial segregation … ethnic and racial enclave economies. I focus specifically on San Francisco, but they are in New York, obviously, when we think about Chinatowns…. The second element is racial capitalism through redevelopment: the compensation of slumlords who have subdivided Victorians and townhomes and created what I call a kind of sardinification—the sardining of black people into these once-gorgeous homes … that means of accumulation in terms of compensating/paying fair market value to the owners of these blighted properties.
But the third piece [is] racial capital through urban renewal debt obligations. Often times—especially in the field of urban studies/urban history—scholars would talk about “federal funds.” [It] becomes a kind of catch phrase. [There are] intergovernmental transfer payments from the federal government to localities, and “federal funds” becomes a slogan.… Urban renewal agencies, what I call municipal debtors—a variety of municipal debtors—issue debt obligations that were purchased by oftentimes commercial banks, who supplied an initial line of credit—[say,] $12 million, $15 million. The renewal agency would use that line of credit, really a debt obligation, and clear entire neighborhoods. And they would promise tax exempt interest income to the holders of the debt obligation, and we see this for urban renewal but also for public housing projects that are financed by long-term bonds.
There’s a difference, though, between public housing debt and, say, urban renewal debt. [Regarding] public housing debt, there are no statutory limitations on the interest rate, whereas for urban renewal (and of course for debt issued by cities), there is a statutory limit in terms of interest rates. So, what you are talking about—public housing—becomes an incredible means of capital accumulation for those investors (fire and casualty insurance companies, wealthy individuals) who are looking to shield their capital from high federal marginal tax rates in the post-World War II period…. It’s a way of hedging, it’s a what I like to call, at that point in time, a precursor to today’s tax off-shore accounts in places like Panama and elsewhere.
Angela Davis uses the term when referring to the “racial dimension of capitalism” (Johnson and Lubin, eds. 2017, p. 248).
Xavier Livermon (2018, 15) draws these two projects together in his keyword “Apartheid.” “As a method of inquiry,” he says, “black studies has been at the forefront of rethinking the notion of apartheid as exceptional, drawing parallels between the formation of racial capitalism in South Africa and elsewhere throughout the African diaspora.” “As South Africans ask questions about how they arrived at this political juncture and what they should do to end vast economic inequality structured by race,” Livermon (2018, p. 18) continues, “it is worth remembering that racial capitalism and its attendant forms of management are global concerns that plague much of the black world.” See also Magubane (1986).
The apotheosis of Cedric Robinson started long before his untimely passing in 2016. Due to his tremendous range and depth of analysis—and his generosity as a mentor and colleague—his body of work is often taken as gospel. Thus, despite the fact that Robinson rejected Marxist orthodoxy, his work is often taken as its own orthodoxy. By way of contrast, we pay tribute to Robinson here in the spirit of hip hop lyricism: sampling his work and playing with his ideas, cadence, and concepts.
It is noteworthy that Robinson refers to Marx’s method as a “critique of capitalism” rather than as a “critique of political economy” [Kritik der politischen Oekonomie] or “critique of capital,” as it is more commonly called amongst people who find productive insights in this vast body of work. This is a telling formulation for reasons that will be apparent.
Robinson (2000 [1983], p. xxviii) chides Marx for focusing exclusively on the plight of “European male wage laborers and artisans in the metropoles of western Europe, Britain, and the United States.” But Marx celebrated armed insurgency against the slaveocracy designed to yield liberation for enslaved people and clarified that the “Negro” was not a slave but was cast as a slave in a particular set of exchange relations. In “Wage Labor and Capital” in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx poses the question, “What is a Negro slave?” His initial answer is facetious: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other” (Marx 1849). Marx then argues precisely why “one explanation” is not “as good as the other”:
A Negro is a Negro. He becomes a slave only in certain relationships. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only in certain relationships does it become capital. Torn from these relationships, it is no more capital than gold in and by itself is money or sugar the price of sugar. (Marx 1849)
But Marx’s interest in historicizing social difference is lost on Robinson who writes that Marx considered “women and children” to be “so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation” (Robinson 2000 [1983], p. xxix). Yet in “Peuchet on Suicide,” Marx mines the writings of eighteenth-century French royalist Jacques Peuchet to discuss four suicides by French women that he traces to paternalism and misogyny in the structure of the family (Marx 1846). Elsewhere, Marx traces changing views of child labor to transformations in the workplace (Marx 1867).
“As Marxists,” says Robinson (2000 [1983]), “their apprenticeships proved to be significant but ultimately unsatisfactory. In time, events and experience drew them toward Black radicalism and the discovery of a collective Black resistance inspired by an enduring cultural complex of historical apprehension.… Taken together, the efforts of Du Bois, James, and Wright consisted of a first step toward the creation of an intellectual legacy that would complement the historical force of Black struggle. Their destiny, I suggest, was not to create the idea of that struggle so much as to articulate it. Regardless, the Black opposition to domination has continued to acquire new forms” (Robinson 1983, p. 5). Robinson critiques Marx for fleeing into the illusory realm of “pure logic and speculation”:
As Marx put it in 1844: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, supplant the criticism of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory, too, will become material force as soon as it seizes the masses.” Given the miserable social and political chaos of their era (and of our own), we should have little difficulty in sympathizing with the impulse to seek political refuge—that is, a social agenda—in the illusory order and power of pure logic and speculation. (Robinson 2000 [1983], p. xxviii)
Yet, Marx’s position is precisely not what Robinson considers it to be but what Robinson claims he wants to see. As Marx (1945) famously declared, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world—the point is to change it.”
For Robinson, Marxism was a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided, Eurocentric take on economy that scholars in the Black Radical Tradition were eventually wise enough to shake off. “In the studies of these [diverse liberation] struggles, and often through engagement with them,” Robinson (2000 [1983], p. xxxi) explains, “the Black Radical Tradition began to emerge and overtake Marxism in the work of these Black radicals. W. E. B. Du Bois, in the midst of the antilynching movement, C. L. R. James, in the vortex of anticolonialism, and Richard Wright, the sharecropper’s son, all brought forth aspects of the militant tradition which had informed successive generations of Black freedom fighters.” But the “freedom fighters” Robinson invokes—and those with whom they were in conversation—developed novel theories of capital without following any thinker’s orthodoxy, whether in the form of original research concerning crime statistics, ballistics, and forensics (Ida B. Wells), sovereignty (Walter Rodney), sport, literature, insurgency, and film (C.L.R. James), or political belonging (Claudia Jones).
“In ‘The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery,’ Marx not only denounced English aristocrats as hypocrites for condemning slavery while evicting and impoverishing their own tenant farmers but also showed that these aristocratic enclosures of common land were, like slavery, a fundamental part of capitalism” (Zimmerman, ed. 2016, p. 1). In other words, part of Robinson’s critique lies in the widely held yet errant assumption that Marx confined slavery to an early—premodern—stage of economic development. This perception stems from a very particular meaning of what Marx termed “primitive accumulation.” Part of this stems from a poor translation. “Primitive” accumulation, or “ursprünglich Akkumulation” is most usefully translated as “original accumulation,” a form of expropriation (Fraser 2016) that Marx views as essential to the way capital works. But, Marx is keenly aware that slavery—and thus the plight of the enslaved—is essential to capital, which is why he always viewed the emancipation of the enslaved as a desirable and essential feature of the project to dismantle capitalist exploitation, even if he did not consider that to be the focus of his theoretical or political project. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes, “Slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry…. Thus slavery is an economic category of the most importance” (Marx 1847). Thus while Robinson (2000 [1983],p. xxvix) holds that Marx’s conceit was to presume that “the theory of historical materialism explained history” yet it “merely rearranged history,” it is crucial to note that Du Bois (1935), James (1938), Rodney (1981), Jones (1949), Williams (1944), and others saw in this tradition the opportunity to tease out carefully the forms of historicity—and not simply those that “resonated with bourgeois Europe”—but those that could help explain how African Americans made sense of Emancipation, how the people of St. Domingue developed the insights and strategies they used to fight a successful war for liberation against Napoleon’s famed army, how Guyanese people might grapple with ethnic and economic fault lines in the decades following abolition, how oppressed people critiqued diverse forms of inequality, and how plantation societies of the Americas generated untold fortunes for European industry, respectively.
Nor is it clear why Robinson’s “Black Radical Tradition” focuses exclusively on the insights of men. Robinson’s scholarship is an exercise in canon formation. In part due to the force of Robinson’s argument and his influence on a generation of scholars, the architects of his “Black Radical Tradition”—W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, C.L.R. James—have been successfully incorporated into mainstream academic scholarship. Part of what the term “racial capitalism” does is to group together scholars who insist on using this phrase despite its limits as an explanatory framework. Walter Johnson (2018) follows Robinson in regarding Du Bois as “the preeminent historian of the ways that racism has defined the history of capitalism and interrupted the universalist pretensions of Marxist orthodoxy”:
Gone in Du Bois are the orthodox markers that serve to keep the history of slavery separate from the history of capitalism. In their place Du Bois proposes a new milestone, the emergence of a sort of capitalism that relies upon the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of notions of racial difference: a global capitalism concomitant with the invention of what Robinson termed “the universal Negro.” In short: racial capitalism.
Johnson not only uses Robinson’s language to describe Du Bois’s project but Robinson’s reading of Du Bois as a critique of Marx. But Marx never proposed separate histories of slavery and capitalism. And Du Bois does not share Johnson’s view of his view of Marx. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois (1935, p. 24) notes the ambivalence of US Marxists. Yet, he also credits Marx with leadership amongst English workers who sent an anti-slavery address to the United States, and made “the black American worker” a “central” figure in their formulation.
Johnson’s (2018) view on Du Bois—and Marx, it seems—comes largely from Cedric Robinson: “Rather than following Adam Smith or Karl Marx, each of whom viewed slavery as a residual form in the world of emergent capitalism, Du Bois treats the plantations of Mississippi, the counting houses of Manhattan, and the mills of Manchester as differentiated but concomitant components of a single system.” Meanwhile, Du Bois (1935, p. 218) highlights several features of Marx’s anti-slavery activism that make it clear he sees the war against slavery as a “central” feature of political transformation for working people everywhere, and quotes from the letter Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln on behalf of the First International Workingmen’s Association: “The workingmen of Europe felt sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the Middle Class, so the American Anti-Slavery war will do for the working classes.” Du Bois (1935, p. 357) even quotes a letter signed by Marx to the President of the National Labor Union:
The immediate tangible result of the Civil War was of course a deterioration of the condition of American Workingmen…. Still the Civil War offered a compensation in the liberation of the slaves and the impulse which it thereby gave your own class movement. Another war, not sanctified by a sublime aim or social necessity, but like the wars of the Old World, would forge chains for free workingmen instead of sundering those of the slaves.
Recall that Du Bois begins Black Reconstruction with a message to his imagined reader that might be difficult to reconcile with what is now being called, “racial capitalism”:
It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts that I have set down. But this latter person I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.
Du Bois’s words are prescient in how they resonate with contemporary approaches that—whether imbued with a positive or negative valence—regard the “Negro as a distinctly inferior creation.”
If Johnson follows Robinson in bracketing Marx—and any reference to him in Du Bois’s work—Lisa Lowe (2015, p. 156) seizes upon a different architect of the “Black Radical Tradition,” C. L. R. James, in her take on “racial capitalism”:
By both citing and yet displacing the formal features of dialectical history, we may read Black Jacobins as much more than an application of European historical forms to slave revolution: it invites the critical deconstruction of the European philosophy of history and opens a new philosophy of history that takes racial capitalism as its object. Furthermore, it creates the possibility for the more composite transnational subject of history, the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways,’ which James would elaborate later in 1952 while interned on Ellis Island.
James does not use the term “racial capitalism,” of course. In fact, he famously argued, “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [is] an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” (James 1938, p. 283). Meanwhile, the idea that James “creates the possibility for the more composite transnational subject of history, the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways,’” is puzzling because “mariners, renegades and castaways” is Herman Melville’s language. In writing Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways while he was imprisoned at Ellis Island awaiting deportation, James makes Melville’s fictional ship the site of his ethnography concerning totalitarianism, with an implicit nod to the forces of McCarthyism then driving him from the United States. James argues it is Melville who “intends to make the crew the real heroes of [Moby Dick], but he is afraid of criticism” (James 1953, p. 18), which prompts James to pose the question that guides his intervention: we know that Captain Ahab’s ship is made up of a diverse crew (“mariners, renegades, and castaways” from far-flung places in Africa, Asia, and Europe)—and that the regime that governs them is brutal and unyielding—so why don’t the members of the crew band together and revolt? It is a question for his time and ours. Whether “racial capitalism” is a prudent way to proceed is a different question entirely.
Robinson (2000 [1983], xxx) ties the appeal of Marxism to its “apparent universalism”:
Unlike the dominant historical discourses of the nineteenth century, historical materialism was inflected by an internationalism and a scientific rigor which plainly transcended the obnoxious and sinister claims for destiny exhibited by such conceits as German nationalism.
But this broad assessment of the stakes of Marxism as a political project cannot explain how Fanon (1961), Guevara (1961), James (1931, 1938), Jones (1949), Rodney (1981), Trouillot (1995), Wells (1895), Wynter (1984a, 1984b) and many others have fashioned Marxism into a critical method concerned with historicizing capital and theorizing dialectics. In relying on a truncated reading of Marx based on the political stance he associates with it rather than the critical methods and approach insurgent scholars and activists have adopted, Cedric Robinson understates how much people in what he calls the Black Radical Tradition developed imaginative new possibilities for theory and praxis by using Marx, yet neither adopting nor rejecting it, uncritically. This insurgent tradition, driven by peoples Africa and the African diaspora, has also incorporated a broader range of social actors, as in W. E. B. Du Bois novel, Dark Princess (1928), which theorizes solidarity between peoples of Africa and South Asia, or his biography of John Brown, which highlights the purchase of armed insurgency by radical European Americans. In this latter regard, it is worth noting that Du Bois included John Brown in his pantheon of intellectual and political influences (Du Bois 1909).
For example, W. E. B. Du Bois is often cited as providing the framework for “racial capitalism,” though he never used the phrase. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois uses “capital” nearly ten times as frequently as “capitalism.”
Consider the pivotal role of passes and identification cards under conditions of slavery, colonization, and apartheid, as well as the central role that passports and state-issued identification cards play in shaping diverse genres of social mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth century. These dynamics also shape paths of protest and critique. As Kaneesha Parsard (2018) notes, Trinidad’s “first Indian-interest political parties was the East Indian National Association (EINA),” created “at the turn of the century” to “challenge the Immigration Ordinance of 1897, which required that all ‘free Indians’ carry a pass or risk arrest.”
In the words of Cedric Robinson, the “Black Radical Tradition was an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle” (1983, p. xxx). As noted above, Black Marxism traffics in truncated, essentialist notions of blackness, as in the idea that African Americans might share a “collective intelligence.” But what if we view “intelligence” as the byproduct of careful documentation and evaluation—“intelligence” in the sense of forensics—like the diasporic army of spies the fictional kingdom of Wakanda has strategically deployed throughout the world in the Black Panther superhero saga?
This notion of “collective intelligence,” that African Americans carefully gather and share in the service of strategic aims, accords with the analysis Glymph (2013a, b) develops about the interrelated projects of insurgency that defined approaches to the armed struggle for liberation in the years leading up to Emancipation, across the gender spectrum.
This notion of “collective intelligence” highlights a key feature of African American intellectual and political engagement—in Robinson’s words “a sense of the calculus of oppression as well as its overt organization and instrumentation” (1983, p. xxx)—precisely what the forensics of capital is designed to illuminate.
Robinson (2000 [1983], p. xxxi) notes that “from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular propagandists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus”—the “racial calculus” that defined race in Europe and would establish the template for forms of political and economic analysis premised on difference throughout the New World. But, the more specific question is how social difference shapes access to capital and political belonging (Ralph 2015), including forms of lending and diplomatic credentials that date back to the age of Mediterranean city-states. This trajectory explains how a person’s social standing (what we might think of as their forensic profile) shapes access to capital (what we might consider their credit profile), a framework that accords with Robinson’s (2000 [1983], p. xxx) project, though he prefers the language of “racial antagonisms”:
As the Black Radical Tradition was distilled from the racial antagonisms which were arrayed along a continuum from the casual insult to the most ruthless and lethal rules of law; from the objectifications of entries in marine cargo manifests, auction accountancy, plantation records, broadsheets and newspapers; from the loftiness of Christian pulpits and biblical exegesis to the minutia of slave-naming, dress, types of food, and a legion of other significations, the terrible culture of race was revealed. Inevitably, the tradition was transformed into a radical force.
The downside is that sometimes people might focus on race to the exclusion of other forms of difference, diminishing the prospects of a more nuanced approach. For, Robinson (2000 [1983], p. 2) did not merely see “Racism” as “a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples.” He is ultimately interested in the way that political belonging is inscribed in formal bureaucratic categories and practices, “[a]s part of the inventory of Western civilization, [racism] would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present.” Thus Robinson is primarily interested in the way African Americans—in fashioning a forensics of capital—came to theorize their predicament and establish a formidable response steeped in mutual aid (Robinson 2000 [1983], p. xxxi):
In the studies of these struggles, and often through engagement with them, the Black Radical Tradition began to emerge.… And over the centuries, the liberation projects of these men and women in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas acquired similar emergent collective forms in rebellion and marronage, similar ethical and moral articulations of resistance….
In highlighting “collective forms” of rebellion—most notably, “marronage”— Robinson treats African people who escaped from enslavement to build their own settlements as his template for political and economic autonomy:
Later, in the colonial settlements, when conditions were favorable, revolts often took the form of marronage, a concession to the re-location of slavery and to the new, syncretic cultural identities emergent from the social cauldron of slave organization…. And in its most militant manifestation, no longer accustomed to the resolution that flight and withdrawal were sufficient, the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based structure (Robinson 2000 [1983], pp. xxx-xxxi).
From Robinson’s perspective, maroons grew weary of accommodating slavery. He defines their project as an attempt to restore African social institutions and traditions. Our interest in the forensics of capital draws upon how Maroons combined African and Afrodiasporic practices and institutions familiar to them (Hurston 1931) with diverse resources in the world they inhabited to pioneer institutions in partnership with indigenous people living in the swamps and hinterlands of the Americas from whom they acquired crucial insights.
“Du Bois drew on Hegelian dialectics and Marx’s notions of class struggle to correct the interpretations of the American Civil War and its subsequent Reconstruction period grown dominant in American historiography (for instance, Woodrow Wilson’s A History of the American People [1908]) and popular culture (Thomas Dixon’s and D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation [1915]). Undaunted by the fact that he was already on forbidden terrain in the thinking of Hegel, Marx, and his own American contemporaries, Du Bois ventured further, uncovering the tradition. Almost simultaneously, James discovered the tradition in the Haitian Revolution. And only a little later, Wright contributed his own critique of proletarian politics from the vantage point of the Black Radical Tradition. For Du Bois, James, and Wright, Marxism became a staging area for their immersion into the tradition. Black Marxism was not a site of contestation between Marxism and the tradition, nor a revision. It was a new vision centered on a theory of the cultural corruption of race. And thus the reach and cross-fertilization of the tradition became evident in the anticolonial and revolutionary struggles of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas” (Robinson 2000 [1983], p. 33).
What we term the “forensics of capital” is likewise useful for interrogating artistic performances and objects, as Hartman (2019, p. xiv) demonstrates in her reading of late nineteenth and early twentieth century photography, as she experiments with strategies for producing narratives “liberated from the judgment and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment.” See Hartman’s (2019, p. 15) related discussion of the crucial role of family name plays in adjudicating social standing:
Without a name, there is a risk that she might never escape the oblivion that is the fate of the minor lives and be condemned to the pose [she assumes in this photograph] for the rest of her existence…. If I knew her name I might be able to locate her, discover if she had any siblings, if her mother was dead, if her grandmother was ‘living in’ with white family, if her father was a rag seller or day laborer, or if she had disappeared. A name is a luxury that she isn’t afforded….
“Late-capitalist-law-and-order logics proliferate individualism and privatization as preeminent moral values that rationalize mass imprisonment by criminalizing the precarious” (Haley 2018, p. 14).
Wang most often uses “late capitalism” when discussing credit, drawing on the “two sides of capitalism” she considers to be illuminated by the work of David Harvey and Rosa Luxemburg, respectively: one sphere governed by law, the other by violence. Wang ties the latter sphere to the “international credit system,” what Harvey terms “the linchpin of late capitalism” (Wang 2018, p. 113):
Stock promotions, ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset-stripping through mergers and acquisitions, and the promotion of levels of debt incumbency that reduce whole populations, even the advanced capitalist countries, to debt peonage, to say nothing of corporate fraud and dispossession of assets (the raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses) by credit and stock manipulations. (Harvey quoted in Wang 2018, p. 114)
Wang explores how these processes are specifically racialized. Drawing on Michael Dawson and Nancy Fraser’s debate about the ongoing roles of race and expropriation in capitalism (Dawson 2016; Fraser 2014; Fraser 2016), Wang writes:
If expropriation and exploitation now occur on a continuum, then it has been made possible, in part, by late capitalism’s current modus operandi: the probabilistic ranking of subjects according to risk, sometimes indexed by a person’s credit score…. [T]his method is not a race-neutral way of gleaning information about a subject’s personal integrity, credibility, or financial responsibility. (Wang 2018, p. 125)
The fact that Sombart’s work has not been taken up more widely—and read more carefully—is puzzling, given the resurgence of interest in the academic study of capitalism during a twenty-first century moment of enduring warfare. But then, Sombart is tainted by an affiliation with Nazism, which in the eyes of some people might invalidate his entire intellectual project.
In the time of the Gulf War, Frederic Jameson published Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of “Late Capitalism” (1991, p. xvii), in which he uses “late capitalism” more than sixty times; though the concept is fraught from the moment he re-introduces it. In responding to what some critics of the 1984 article viewed as an inadequate theory of agency, Jameson clarifies:
Agency, however, raises the issue of the other unit of my title, ‘late capitalism,’ about which something further needs to be said. In particular, people have begun to notice that [late capitalism] functions as a sign of some kind and seems to carry a burden of intent and consequences not clear to the noninitiate.
It is not clear how someone becomes initiated in the religion of “late capitalism”, but Jameson proceeds as if sharing insights he has gleaned from careful study in this particular faith tradition.
Jameson begins with a confession tainted by commercial intrigue. “Late capitalism”, he says, “is not my favorite slogan.” Jameson then spews a soup of cognate concepts, as if possessed by the very spirit he is struggling to channel:
I try to vary it with the appropriate synonyms (“multinational capitalism,” “spectacle or image society,” “media capitalism,” “the world system,” even “Postmodernism” itself); but as the Right has also spotted what evidently seems to them a dangerous new concept and a way of speaking (even though some of the economic diagnoses overlap their own, and a term like postindustrial society certainly has a family likeness), this particular terrain of ideological struggle, which unfortunately one rarely chooses oneself, seems a solid one and worth defending. (Jameson 1991, p. xvii)
Jameson critiques the ideological resolve of the conservative right, yet pits “late capitalism” as an ideological project “worth defending”—a concept that best distills the array of concerns he associates with a left critique.
Jameson is nothing if not postmodern—constantly interrupting yourself is a telltale sign of a postmodern narrative (especially when you clear space for the author to expand upon, and elaborate, otherwise seemingly mundane and inessential aspects of the argument); and, the recursive logic on which Jameson relies (that “postmodernism” is the cultural logic of “late capitalism” and that “late capitalism” can mean a bunch of other stuff, including “postmodernism”) is as postmodern as you can be. That much is clear. The stakes of “late capitalism” as a critical project—according to Jameson—are less clear.
“What marks the development of the new concept over the older one (which was still roughly consistent with Lenin’s notion of a ‘monopoly stage’ of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers” (Jameson 1991, pp. xvii-xviii). The limits of Jameson’s argument are painfully apparent by the time he glosses “imperialism” as “little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers.” We, instead, see “imperialism” as the infrastructure of the system Jameson is referring to and yet is unable to describe in a way that is precise, reliable, or coherent. As many scholars of racial capitalism have noted, violence (that is the illicit and extralegal use of force) is a crucial feature of the system.
Ultimately, we agree with Frederick Cooper, who concludes that there are two problems with “globalization,” the “global” and the “-ization”: the respective notions that the world has been reduced to a small community, and the assumption that this process is continuous as well as teleological (Cooper 2001).
Geographer David Harvey sees his project as adding a political and economic dimension to the broader discussion about postmodernism and twentieth century capitalism. Yet, he uses “late capitalism” only four times in The Condition of Postmodernity (1991). Like Jameson, Harvey treats “late” as “contemporary” when using “late capitalism” to discuss Jameson’s Postmodernism, then switching to “late twentieth-century capitalism” for the remainder of his book. In other words, Harvey treats these terms as synonymous, or at least cognate concepts. Each time, “late capitalism” is used to note the rampant consumerism that Harvey and Jameson argue marks “postmodernism” as an aesthetic. But, rather than interrogating “late capitalism,” Harvey treats it as a viable way to explain a “new era” of capitalism that has been pervasive “since the early 1960s.” Harvey uses “late capitalism” to refer to the economic transformations of the last few decades of the twentieth century rather than—as we show in the social media usage—a way to grapple with the contradictions that capitalism occasions:
[T]he production of culture ‘has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel seeming goods (from clothes to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.’ The struggles that were once exclusively waged in the arena of production have, as a consequence, now spilled outwards to make cultural production an arena of fierce social conflict…. The deployment of advertising as ‘the official art of capitalism’ brings advertising strategies into art, and art into advertising strategies. (Harvey 1991, p. 63)
For both Harvey and Jameson, capitalism is a state of affairs for which there is no apparent end in sight. For Jameson, there does not even appear to be any escape; for this reason, we have considered the implications of this argument at length. But, with the advantage of the past few decades, we can now ask more deliberate questions about what it means for scholars to proliferate the concept of “late capitalism”—that is, the notion that the newest phase of capitalism has arrived and is here to stay—at the precise moment when advocates of free market fundamentalism declared victory, and in the decades to follow?
In fact, many people who refer to “late capitalism” cite it only once in a given publication, a trend that even Sombart followed after publishing Der moderne Kapitalismus (Reyes and Xavier 2014; Balmer and Sandland 2012; Boluk and Lenz 2010; Briggs 2007; Butler-Wall 2015; Dominguez 2009; Drabinski and Harkins 2013; Dumas 2018; Fry 2012; Halberstam 2012; Kilgore 2013; Makdisi 2010; Powers 2015; Rieder 2015; Sombart 1929; Thompson 2009; Ward 2012).
For Nikhil Singh (2017, pp. 39, 57), Frederick Douglass’s reference to the “Black carpenter” and the vexed context of his employment “highlights the double threat of wagelessness and political degradation.” It is not a commentary on the paradox that enslaved people can acquire skills that foster access better working conditions, or enable them to: generate revenue, craft strategies for their liberation, compete with laborers of other racial backgrounds, and make extraordinary contributions to technology and the arts for which they can be highly regarded. “Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor,” Ed Baptist observes. But what of “stories” emphasizing the ingenuity of enslaved workers?
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Ralph, M., Singhal, M. Racial capitalism. Theor Soc 48, 851–881 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09367-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09367-z