Racial capitalism


Racial capitalism is a concept proposed by Cedric J. Robinson describing the process of deriving social and economic value from another person of a different racial identity, predominantly used to insinuate the derivation of value from those of a nonwhite identity; however, a person of any race might engage in racial capitalism, as might an institution dominated by one particular race. The elementary thesis of the concept is: Capitalism as an economic system subsists on the perpetual accumulation of capital and an increasing rate of said accumulation, and capital "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups." Therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value." And in both 17th-century and contemporary society, the predominant differentiator was and is skin color and ethnicity. In Robinson's own words: "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions," and "it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism."
The term was coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983. Robinson's articulations of racial capitalism were imperative in the emerging field of Black and diasporic African studies, wherein new lines were drawn between capitalism, racial identity, and the development of the disconnected social consciousness—the disjunction or discontinuity of interhuman relations—in the 20th-century. Building upon earlier examinations of racial discrimination in and inherent to various political ideologies and societal structures, Robinson challenged the Marxist notion of capitalism's negation of the basic discriminatory tenets of European feudalism, namely its rigid caste system and reliance upon multi-generational serfdom. Rather than considering capitalism as revolutionary and radically liberating, as, say, Michael Novak does, he argued for the inverse: capitalism did not liberate those in racially oppressive positions, nor did it reject feudal principles; in other words, capitalism bred a new world order, one that extended—not deconstructed—feudalism's ethical faults, and one that developed and became intertwined with various forms of racial oppression: "slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide." In 1983, Robinson writes:
What concerns us is that we understand that racialism and its permutations persisted, rooted not in a particular era but in the civilization itself. And though our era might seem a particularly fitting one for depositing the origins of racism, that judgment merely reflects how resistant the idea is to examination and how powerful and natural its specifications have become. Our confusions, however, are not unique. As an enduring principle of European social order, the effects of racialism were bound to appear in the social expression of every strata of every European society no matter the structures upon which they were formed. None was immune.
Further, Robinson theorized that all capitalism was inherently racial capitalism, and racialism can be exhibited in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. And although racial capitalism is not limited to European territories or those previously under Europe's colonial or imperial rule, it was from western European's 17th-century dominion that the two, capitalism and racial exploitation, were first conflated. Thus, racial capitalism, according to Robinson, emanated from the "tendency of European civilization...not to homogenize but to differentiate"—differentiation that led to racial hierarchization and, as a result, exploitation, expropriation, and expatriation.

History

1600s

The fusion of race and capitalism first materialized with the advent of the African Slave Trade, in the late 17th-century. Though slavery existed for thousands of years prior to the conquest of the Americas and the commodification of the African man—for instance: classical Greek and Roman Supply chains were heavily reliant upon slave labor—racism and its convergence with capital as is understood today emerged concurrently with the 1600s' oceanic trade routes. The transatlantic voyage of the English to the New World, unlike the conquests of the Spanish crown, which yielded significant deposits of gold, silver, and other final metals, was subsidized primarily through diligent and systematic agricultural businesses. From its inception, cash crop agriculture was serviced chiefly by white indentured servants, and it was not until the sixties and seventies that servitude was formally institutionalized into slavery. The indentured servants, mostly indebted or imprisoned English and Irish immigrants, worked under a plantation owner for a set period of time, usually for four to seven years, before obtaining 'free man' status. As plantations expanded and workloads surged, and as indentured servitude terms expired, white American colonists yearned for more sustainable means of economical, unrestricted employment to meet growing demand and ever-increasing profit quotas.
In 1661 the Barbados Slave Code was signed into law, serving as a basis for the Caribbean slave trade. On paper the legislation protected both the slave and the slave master from heinous cruelty; however, in effect, only the latter party received lawful security. Further, owners were provided with various methods to keep slaves in-line, and by law were proffered legal intervention if slaves pursued retaliation or a collective insurrection.
It's important to note: During this time, citizens of color lived amongst the colonies, some of which even enjoyed state-protected freedom. On one account, the Chesapeake Bay, in the early to mid 1600s, was described as having a multiracial character:
There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.

Critiques

Critics of racial capitalism repudiate the correlation between racialism, primarily in the form of slavery, and capitalism, on the grounds of slavery's misconstrued global chronology and historicity. The central argument is that racial oppression emerged centuries before modernity, and did so independent of capitalist society. Thomas Sowell, for example, in his book Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, published in 1974, argues that "apitalism could not possibly be the cause of slavery because slavery preceded capitalism as the dominant social order in virtually all parts of the world." According to Sowell, slavery in ancient civilizations predates the ideas and writings of capitalism's 18th-century forefathers, such as Adam Smith and his seminal text The Wealth of Nations. The origin of slavery and all forms of systematic racial oppression reach back thousands of years to, e.g., Spartan and Athenian society.
Plato, for instance, living in the 5th-century B.C., recognized and admitted institutional slavery into the Utopian state, Magnesia, described in his work Laws. And, two millennial later, in the Middle Ages, slaves played an integral part in imperial economies, and the role of the slave eventually evolved into that of the feudal serf. In its myriad forms, "lavery was practiced without regard to race in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and by Native Americans in North and South America," for thousands of years prior to capitalism's inception. For that reason, critics of racial capitalism argue that: Capitalism does not foster racial separation and oppression, rather it serves as an economic system, one of many over the years, that merely permits—not encouraging nor escalating—the propagation of racial biases and prejudices that naturally arise and afflict a given multiracial society.
With particular regard to the United States, the Jim Crow laws—one of many state-sponsored instruments of American racial segregation—arose from the minds of ardent segregationists as an attempt to further exclude "African-Americans from mainstream political and economic life." In this case, rather than capitalism in and of itself, historians accredit statist lobbies of post-Civil War society with the inauguration of the aforementioned racially-discriminatory legislation. In fact, the principles of capitalism, particularly the law of supply and demand at work in labor markets, were, in effect, partially responsible for the integration of the African-American worker into the mainstream economy, owing to the employer's normative inclination to pursue the least-costly available form of productive labor. In The Declining Significance of Race, William Julius Wilson writes:
Indeed, the determination of industrialists to ignore racial norms of exclusion and to hire black workers was one of the main reasons why the industry-wide unions reversed their racial policies and actively recruited black workers during the New Deal era. Prior to this period the overwhelming majority of unskilled and semiskilled blacks were non-unionized and were available as lower-paid labor or as strikebreakers.