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Published: 29 April 2020
Listening to Black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism
Siddhant Issar
Contemporary Political Theory (2020)Cite this article
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Abstract
This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue durée framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.
This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM).1 BLM grounds its structural analysis of Black oppression on the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ which Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983]) proposed in 1983 to call attention to the ways racism permeates the organization and development of capitalism.2 Although the movement emerged as a direct response to lethal vigilante and police violence, BLM has consistently linked contemporary anti-Black violence to historical structures of oppression (Garza, 2014; The Movement for Black Lives, 2016; Ransby, 2018). Racial capitalism, which is explicitly named in the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) policy platform, ‘A Vision for Black Lives’, helps forge that link.
It is noteworthy that BLM reaches back to Robinson’s (2000 [1983]) Black Marxism, rather than drawing on more recent high-profile accounts of neoliberal capitalism by scholars such as David Harvey (2007, 2015a) and Wendy Brown (2015, 2016). This article thus poses two questions. First, it asks what the framework of racial capitalism offers BLM that these other widely-read accounts do not. Second, it asks what those critical theorizations of neoliberalism might learn from BLM and the concept of racial capitalism. In short, what are the political and theoretical benefits of using racial capitalism as a point of departure to understand capitalism, particularly neoliberalism capitalism?
I address these questions by first interrogating how two of the most influential accounts of neoliberalism in critical political theory, namely the neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches of David Harvey (2007, 2015a) and Wendy Brown (2015, 2016), respectively, theorize race and racial domination. I argue that both Harvey and Brown treat racial domination as epiphenomenal to the structure and logic of contemporary capitalism.3 I demonstrate how these accounts lack an explanation for the disproportionate material effects of neoliberalism on racialized populations, especially Black and Indigenous populations, and cast the struggles of subordinated racialized, gendered, and sexualized populations as impeding a united left struggle against capital.
I then show how M4BL’s policy platform, ‘A Vision for Black Lives’, mobilizes the framework of racial capitalism. Through a close reading of the platform’s demand for reparations, I suggest that the concept of racial capitalism helps theoretically ground and connect the histories of slavery and colonialism with the contemporary economic-material predicament of Black populations. Robinson’s unique structural analysis of capitalism captures how racial domination configures the history and theory of capitalism. It makes sense for BLM to turn to the framework of racial capitalism, rather than to colorblind critiques of neoliberalism, especially since BLM’s overall goal is to politicize the structural pervasiveness of anti-Black racial domination across the political, economic, social, and cultural domains.
BLM’s invocation of the notion of racial capitalism – as an alternative conceptualization of capitalism – spotlights the political relevance of this framework for the movement’s analyses, and this relevance, I suggest, can be extended to better theorize neoliberal capitalism. My analysis presupposes that emancipatory social movements such as BLM are sites of knowledge production, mobilizing and producing alternative knowledges to intervene in the world (Casas-Cortés et al, 2008). Further, these knowledges are useful not only in movement spaces; they can and should inform critical theorizing within the academy as well. This article follows BLM’s lead to show how the framework of racial capitalism can be productively engaged to develop a more robust account of neoliberalism, one that is attentive to the histories and continuing realities of racial domination.
The final section of the article offers a preliminary outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism. I point to the necessity of historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s longue durée, drawing attention to continuities in capitalism’s racialized exploitation and expropriation dialectic. I thus reveal the qualitatively distinct ways capitalism—including in its contemporary neoliberal phase – extracts and expropriates labor, land, and resources from non-white populations, especially Black and Indigenous groups. I end by briefly examining the possibilities engendered by a critical theory of racial capitalism for the American left, particularly with regard to the class-versus-identity debate.
Race and David Harvey’s neo-Marxist critique of neoliberalism
According to neo-Marxist conceptualizations, neoliberalism is a set of ‘political-economic’ ideas and practices that comes into prominence in the late 1970s and is aimed at restoring and consolidating elite class power (Harvey, 2007; Duménil and Lévy, 2004, 2011). In other words, neoliberalism (or ‘neoliberalization’) is a class-based project that is ultimately structured by an imperative to redistribute wealth from the lower classes to economic elites. While attentive to transformations in political economy accompanying the rise of neoliberalism, the neo-Marxist perspective often presents social struggles along axes of race, gender, and sexuality as a major hindrance to successful leftist class struggle against neoliberal hegemony. This narrative not only rests on a formalistic disaggregation of class from race, gender, and sexuality, concealing the history of radical anti-racist, feminist, and queer movements, but it also blames such movements for the consolidation of neoliberalism. To more clearly understand the ways neo-Marxists theorize race and anti-racist struggles vis-à-vis neoliberalism, I turn to the work of arguably the most influential contemporary neo-Marxist critic of neoliberalism, David Harvey.
In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey explains that neoliberalism is ‘a theory of political-economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (2007, p. 2). Historically emerging as a viable ideology in the United States and western Europe amidst the crisis of capital accumulation that peaked in the 1970s, neoliberalism marked the demise of the welfare state or what Harvey refers to as ‘embedded liberalism’. While the post-war Keynesian state in the United States and western Europe was defined, according to Harvey, by a ‘class compromise’ between capital and labor, neoliberalism aimed at reinstating the power of the capitalist class by crushing the (relative) power of labor during this period. To meet this aim, the ruling class had to ideologically engineer the acceptance of neoliberal logics as common sense, especially in the global north where direct force was not really an option (Harvey, 2007, p. 39).
Harvey emphasizes that one of the primary mechanisms through which neoliberalism became hegemonic in the global north was by co-opting leftist social movements. He states, ‘it has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities’ (Harvey, 2007, pp. 41–42). Although these ‘particular identities’, along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality, did not originate under neoliberalism, Harvey argues that they were easily exploited by the ruling class to undermine the power of labor movements and the left. In the United States, Harvey contends, ‘Left movements failed to recognize or confront, let alone transcend, the inherent tension between the quest for individual freedoms and social justice’ (2007, p. 43). Harvey thus creates a dichotomy between movements that transcend the ‘inherent tension’ between ‘social justice’ and ‘individual freedoms’ (legitimate left movements) and those that get stuck pursuing ‘individual freedoms’ (identity politics). In this account of the rise of neoliberal hegemony, struggles around race, gender, and sexuality are presented as not only mutually exclusive from class struggle, but as an impediment that prevents the formation of an effective class politics that can counter neoliberalism’s ascendance.4 What enables Harvey to create such a dichotomy, and what are the political effects of this dichotomy?
Harvey’s dichotomizing of movements is a symptom of a larger theoretical issue whereby he artificially separates class from race, gender, and sexuality, and cleaves off political economy from the political, social, and cultural realms. Politically, Harvey’s neo-Marxist account places normative emphasis on movements that can put aside racial, gender, and sexual differences in favor of a pure class-based politics. Although Harvey mentions some of the devastating effects of neoliberalism on certain populations, such as the criminalization of marginalized populations, his analysis cannot explain why particular racialized populations disproportionately bear the brunt of capital flight, deindustrialization, predatory finance capital, state retrenchment of social welfare, and other neoliberal policies. Further, Harvey’s lack of historical analysis of the structural relations between neoliberalism and ‘particular identities’ leads him – and other neo-Marxist analyses with similar approaches – to reproduce faulty abstractions that marginalize and alienate communities that are in fact more severely affected by neoliberalism.
In subsequent works, Harvey has explicitly strengthened the separation discussed above to cordon race, gender, and sexuality from the inner logic of capital. For example, in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Harvey (2015a) states that while capitalism has a deeply racialized and gendered history, he excludes racialization and gender discrimination from his investigation because ‘although they are omnipresent within capitalism they are not specific to the form of circulation and accumulation that constitutes the economic engine of capitalism’ (pp. 7–8). The goal he sets for himself is to isolate capital accumulation and circulation and to study these aspects of capitalism as a ‘closed system’. As a result, race and gender are rendered superfluous since they supposedly reveal ‘nothing particular about how the economic engine of capital works, even as it [racialization and gender discrimination] identifies one source from where it [capitalism] plainly draws its energy’ (Harvey, 2015a, pp. 7–8). By erecting tendentious and abstract boundaries, Harvey’s analysis briefly acknowledges the influence of race and gender on capitalism only to simultaneously position racial and gendered relations of power as contingent to the logic of capital.
Underscoring Harvey’s arbitrary bracketing of race and gender from an account of capitalism and anti-capitalist struggles, Alex Dubliet (2015), for instance, states that it is ‘unclear’ why ‘racialization is no less necessarily part of the historical and material story of capitalism than the modern state formation’ (also see Manning, 2015). Dubilet (2015) follows his theoretical query with a political concern, that Harvey’s ‘formal analysis of capital’ ends up sidelining ‘the most intense mobilizations [in the United States] against the capitalist order…since they were focused precisely on the question of systematic police violence against non-white populations’. Given the centrality of race to contemporary left mobilizations, Dubilet insists on the need to adequately theorize and support anti-racist struggles, instead of walling them off from leftist politics. In response to Dubilet’s sharply formulated critique, Harvey (2015b) states that race is a unique concern of the American left and political struggles around racial discrimination are important inasmuch as these struggles reconfigure the social terrain; however, ‘we should be clear that such struggles are anti-racist and not necessarily anti-capitalist…frankly I don’t see the current struggles in Ferguson as dealing very much in anti-capitalism’.
Harvey’s easy dismissal of Dubilet’s critique stems from his neo-Marxist theoretical framework, premised as this framework is on a formalistic separation between, on one hand, class from race, gender, and sexuality, and, on the other hand, anti-capitalist movements from struggles around ‘identity’. Thus, both in Seventeen Contradictions and his work on neoliberalism, Harvey brings up race either to highlight its irrelevance to the inner logic of capital or to separate anti-racist struggles from anti-capitalist struggles and present the focus on race (among other ‘identity’ struggles) as a chief cause for the fragmentation of the American left. Such theorizing fails to explain why particular racialized, gendered, and sexualized populations are disproportionately affected by neoliberal policies. Instead, in a deeply perverse manner, these populations are blamed for the consolidation of neoliberal hegemony. As we will see, BLM’s recourse to the framework of racial capitalism challenges the way neo-Marxists like Harvey theorize the relationship between race and capitalism.
Race and Wendy Brown’s neo-foucaultian critique of neoliberalism
Contrasting the neo-Marxist focus on macro-level political economy, neo-Foucaultian and post-structuralist understandings of neoliberal capitalism accentuate the governing rationality and the production of subjectivities under neoliberalism (Brown 2015, 2016; Lazzarato 2012, 2015). Here I focus primarily on Brown as an exemplar of the neo-Foucaultian approach to neoliberalism to show how her theoretical framework, like Harvey’s, separates the functioning of neoliberalism from race and extant configurations of power. This theoretical partitioning also produces inaccurate generalizations about the way neoliberalism works across racialized populations.
Lecturing about American neoliberalism, Foucault (2010) explains that under neoliberalism market rationality is generalized ‘throughout the social body’ such that processes, relations, and behaviors previously associated with non-economic domains can now be submitted to a ‘grid of intelligibility’ that takes the market as its mode of analysis, thereby generating an economic analysis of non-economic phenomena (p. 243). Adding to and updating Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, Brown suggests that this process of ‘economization’ of non-economic spheres economization fosters the way we orient ourselves to the world around us (2015, p. 31): neoliberalism entails thinking and acting like ‘market subjects where monetary wealth generation is not the immediate issue, for example, in approaching one’s education, health, fitness, family life, or neighborhood’ (Brown, 2015, p. 31). With the dissemination of market rationality to every sphere of life, individuals are modeled and configured as rational market actors and entrepreneurs of the self that are and should be constantly making calculations to maximize their own human capital. Neoliberalism is therefore understood as a governing rationality reconfiguring individual subjectivities in an entrepreneurial mold.
Brown (2015, 2016) argues that neoliberal rationality functions through a dual mechanism. On the one hand, it provides a descriptive analysis of who we are and how we behave that ontologizes the subject as an economic subject. On the other hand, neoliberal rationality makes a normative claim about how we ought to behave, namely that we should apply a cost-benefit analysis to every sphere of our life (Brown, 2015, p. 36). The gap between the ontological and the normative is bridged through modes of governmentality that help produce the requisite subjectivities. What is brought into sharp focus in such analyses is that generalizations about neoliberalism abound, particularly in relation to the production of individual subjectivities. These generalizations beg the question: does neoliberalism configure the subjectivities of all individuals equally irrespective of race, gender, and sexuality? While Brown’s (2015) Undoing the Demos offers a brief examination of the neoliberal homo oeconomicus’ gender and the ways ‘gender subordination is both intensified and fundamentally altered’ under neoliberalism, she prefaces her analysis with a revealing disclaimer: ‘This is not a broad inquiry into the gendered, racialized, or colonial character of neoliberal capitalism, but a more narrow one into the discursive status of feminized family labor in the neoliberal displacement of homo politicus by homo oeconomicus’ (pp. 99-106). While illuminating how the gutting of public services and social infrastructure under neoliberalism, and its corresponding moralized justification, produces an intensification in forms of gendered care work, Brown’s analysis paints over the ways race indexes the unequal distribution of care work. Thus, even as Brown’s inquiry disrupts the fiction of a gender-neutral neoliberal subject, she reinforces a colorblind understanding of neoliberalism’s homo oeconomicus.
Indeed, Brown leaves unspecified the formative differences that might exist between the subjectivities of different groups of people within a particular neoliberal social formation. Given Brown’s focus on the United States, it seems unlikely that the subjectivity of white workers and Black workers will be configured in the same way even as neoliberalism affects and acts upon both groups (see Du Bois, 1998; Roediger, 2007; Spence, 2015). More importantly, Brown’s analysis hides the qualitatively different forms of violence experienced by racialized groups under neoliberalism. Patchen Markell (2017), for instance, asks if the race of homo oeconomicus complicates Brown’s understanding of the neoliberal subject, including her analysis of gender subordination under neoliberalism. Pointing to the intersection of white supremacy and neoliberal rationality, Markell notes that neoliberalism ‘does not homogenize all subjects as self-maximizing capitals, large and small, but marks out some populations as manipulable and disposable material, fit to be ruled through the often coercive and violent command-and-control techniques that neoliberal rationality itself eschews’ (2017, p. 525). By separating considerations of white supremacy from her analysis, Brown’s theorization of neoliberalism and neoliberal subjectivity proceeds from the perspective of the presumed-universal white subject, hiding neoliberalism’s markedly different effects on racialized populations.5
Brown’s neo-Foucaultian account thus enacts a separation between race and neoliberalism that parallels Harvey’s cordoning off of capital’s inner logic from racialized and gendered relations of power and anti-capitalist struggles from so-called identity politics. Emerging from this partitioning is a faulty theoretical understanding of neoliberalism and its modalities of violence. Such analyses also engender a left politics that renders intersectional struggles such as those foregrounded by BLM as at best a distraction from the fight against neoliberal capitalism and, at worst, an expression of neoliberal identity politics. In contrast, the subsequent section illustrates how M4BL’s policy platform takes a radically different approach to theorizing the relationship between race, capitalism, and the contemporary economic situation of Black populations.
BLM’s ‘knowledge-practices’: ‘A vision for Black lives’ and racial capitalism
Foregrounding the centrality of Robinson’s (2000) analytic of racial capitalism to the political education agenda of M4BL and to BLM’s systemic critique, Ransby (2018) documents how BLM activists engaged in discussions and workshops around the concept of racial capitalism (p. 118). Relatedly, in a talk titled ‘Revisiting Black Marxism in the wake of Black Lives Matter’, Robin Kelley offers an invitation to Marxists to read Cedric Robinson’s work and suggests that ‘A Vision for Black Lives’ is ‘perhaps the clearest articulation of the framework that Black Marxism offers’ (Speak Out Now, 2016). Taking up Kelley’s invitation, this section reads M4BL’s platform and Robinson alongside one another, offering an alternative to both neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian analyses of neoliberalism.
In engaging with BLM’s primary documents, I recognize BLM as a site of knowledge production. I follow social movement scholars who argue that emancipatory movements in challenging the status-quo generate and mobilize alternative explanations, analyses, and critiques of the specific social and political conjunctures they find themselves in (Alvarez et al, 1998; Casas-Cortés et al, 2008; Cox, 2014; della Porta and Pavan, 2017). That is, social movements embody collective processes for people to identify ‘injustice, oppression or stigma’ and to articulate ‘alternative understandings to change [extant] social relations’ (Cox, 2014, p. 957). Movements such as BLM are thus not simply objects of study, but draw on and produce knowledges in their own right. These knowledges or ‘knowledge-practices’ are critical, then, ‘not only for making sense of movements, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as political knowledge for society at large’ (Casas-Cortés et al, p. 28). Grasping these knowledges, however, requires a method that values ‘listening’ and is ‘receptive’ to analyses put forth by movements (Casas-Cortés et al, p. 28).
This section focuses on one expression of BLM’s knowledge-practices, the notion of racial capitalism. In ‘listening’ to and tracing BLM’s use of this notion, I am not suggesting that the policy platform itself offers a theoretical exposition on racial capitalism. Rather, M4BL’s use of racial capitalism – an alternative, non-hegemonic conceptualization of capitalism – raises pressing theoretical and political questions for accounts of neoliberalism such as Harvey’s and Brown’s that depoliticize the ways racial domination and contemporary capitalism are linked. By investigating BLM’s use of racial capitalism as an essential aspect of the movement’s critique of anti-Black oppression and drawing out why the framework of racial capitalism might be appealing to BLM, I suggest how critical political theory can learn from BLM.
The policy platform
Drafted by over fifty Black organizations and released in August 2016, ‘A Vision for Black Lives’ is at once ‘a visionary agenda’ and a practical resource guide for collective struggle (The Movement for Black Lives, 2016). Making six demands – end the war on Black people; reparations; invest-divest; economic justice; community control; and political power – the platform synthetically blends historical, theoretical, and empirical studies and observations to provide a political and normative analysis of the contemporary predicament of Black communities in the United States.
While capitalism forms a key aspect of the platform’s analysis of oppression, it is not conceptualized in isolation from other forms of domination. For example, the platform’s Invest-Divest demand states, ‘The interlinked systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy shape the violence we face…Until we are able to overturn US imperialism, capitalism and white supremacy, our brothers and sisters around the world will continue to live in chains’ (The Movement for Black Lives, 2016). Here, the platform emphasizes the interlocking nature of structures of oppression and their differential impact on specific bodies and populations, reflecting BLM’s explicit grounding in Black feminist politics and its commitment to intersectionality.6 Within this broader conceptual framework, capitalism is always understood relationally, in its dynamic linkages with structures such as imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
To be sure, there is long and rich history of scholarship that theorizes the interconnections between imperialism, colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism (see, for instance, Du Bois, 1998; James, 1989; Williams, 1994; Davis, 1971, 1983; Combahee River Collective, 1983). The platform’s analyses and knowledge-practices implicitly and explicitly invoke and draw on such scholarly and activist traditions, ranging from Black queer socialist feminisms to abolitionist thought to what Robinson terms the ‘Black radical tradition’ (Ransby, 2018). It bears emphasizing, however, that these bodies of scholarship are largely siloed from dominant left critiques of capitalism (Bohrer, 2020). As argued in the previous section, popular left accounts of neoliberalism treat racial domination as superfluous to the overall structure of capitalism. In contrast, by locating capitalism in relation to other structures of oppression, the platform unsettles the often rigid boundary between the theorization of capitalism and that of white supremacy, anti-Black racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and Indigenous dispossession.
The platform’s demand for reparations explicitly draws on the framework of racial capitalism to bring the contemporary effects of slavery and colonialism into sharp relief. This distinctive conceptualization of capitalism, I suggest, lends theoretical substance to the platform’s claim that racial domination structures the capitalist economy. The demand asserts: ‘reparations for past and continuing harms. The government, responsible corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they have inflicted on Black people – from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance – must repair the harm done’ (The Movement for Black Lives, 2016). Five sub-demands that are more specific in their framing follow. Demand two provides an in-depth, three-part explanation justifying the need for reparations. The first two parts are especially instructive:
(1)
Structural racism – particularly against Black Americans – has shaped the rules of our economy since the founding of the U.S. The combination of slavery, America’s deep-rooted system of racial capitalism, and long-lasting discriminatory institutions have for centuries denied Black people equal access to the wealth created through their labor (The Movement for Black Lives, 2016).
(2)
[S]uch racism continues to drive unequal economic outcomes and opportunities that are passed on intergenerationally. Today, an entire system of laws, regulations, policies, and normative practices explicitly exclude Black Americans from the economy and from leading safe, healthy, and economically secure lives. In the past, this took the form of Jim Crow and problematic racial and gender exclusions in New Deal social policies; now, the most glaring example is our racialized system of mass incarceration (The Movement for Black Lives, 2016).
Providing a point of entry into the platform’s conceptualization of the economic situation of Black populations in the United States, the demands’ historical framing extends from slavery to the founding of the United States to the present and includes references to Jim Crow, the New Deal, and the current system of mass incarceration. This contrasts with Harvey’s and Brown’s critiques of neoliberalism which conceal the ways contemporary neoliberal modalities of dispossession, debt, and the production of subjectivities are mapped onto and married with ‘previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices’ (Chakravartty and da Silva, 2012, p. 368). By explicitly situating the contemporary moment within a longue durée historical framework, the platform reveals racialized continuities in the American capitalist economy, particularly the simultaneous hyper-exploitation and marginalization of Black populations.
The demand also establishes a connection between structural racism and the economy; the former ‘shapes’ or configures the latter. This relationship between structural racism and the economic system is not simply confined to the era of founding or antebellum slavery, but continues to exist and has been reproduced across generations. An analytical claim that can be distilled from this demand’s explanation is that racial domination is constitutive of, rather than epiphenomenal to, the United States’s economy.
On one interpretation, the platform’s move to bring slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the present economic reality of Black people into a single historical framework might appear to be a provocative rhetorical flourish, bearing little theoretical and explanatory value. The same can be said about stating that the ‘deep-rooted system of racial capitalism’, rather than simply capitalism, is a factor driving historical and contemporary racialized economic disparities. Yet, while the platform is undoubtedly meant to be provocative, its use of particular language, rhetoric, and theoretical frameworks cannot be reduced to mere provocation. Such a reading fails to recognize how social movements like BLM are knowledge producers, building on and deploying alternative analytical lenses to intervene in the world. From this perspective, social movements do not solely make change by transforming public policies, they also do so ‘through the elaboration and the experimentation of alternative epistemologies, that is, systems of ideas, theories, and strategies’ (della Porta and Pavan, 2017, p. 298). We must hence not lose sight of the concrete political context within which the platform emerges, and why and to what ends it mobilizes ‘alternative epistemologies’ such as the notion of racial capitalism.
As an unfolding social movement, one of BLM’s goals is to reveal the systemic nature of anti-Black racism in the United States and globally (Taylor, 2016). A facet of this larger project is to expose and politicize the fact that the capitalist economy is constituted by a racial logic. The need to politicize the link between capitalism and racial domination is itself a response to how this link has been depoliticized and concealed by liberal and influential left theorists of capitalism. The platform’s analysis is thus strikingly different from colorblind understandings of capitalism. By evading the ways racial domination structures neoliberalism, Harvey and Brown depoliticize and obscure the entanglement between racial domination and the capitalist economy. The platform, on the other hand, invokes Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism precisely to highlight the historical, ongoing, and structural interconnections between race and capitalism. Of course, it is only by listening to BLM and taking the knowledges they draw upon seriously that we can begin to understand why BLM deploy this alternative conceptualization of capitalism.
The framework of racial capitalism is a unique expression of BLM’s knowledge-practices. Naming capitalism as racial capitalism is a deliberate, political act that not only highlights a particular understanding of capitalism, but also, as Kelley lays out, urges leftists unfamiliar with Robinson’s work and the Black radical tradition more generally to engage with this body of scholarship. To better highlight why BLM make recourse to this specific framework, I explore the conceptual intension of racial capitalism by turning to Robinson’s work.
Robinson’s racial capitalism
In Black Marxism, Robinson (2000) contends that capitalism, from its emergence, is structured by ‘racialism’. For Robinson, ‘racialism’, understood as the legitimation of an existing social order by reference to ‘natural’ biological and/or cultural characteristics, emerges not in the colonial encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans, but in feudal, intra-European relations that preceded that encounter (pp. 66–68). At the same time, and against Marx and Engels’s understanding of capitalism as the radical negation of feudalism, Robinson argues that capitalism extended a feudal emphasis on racial differentiation between different groups into an emerging world-system (see Kelley, 2017). Consequently, Robinson makes the structural argument that the ‘tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones’ (2000, pp. 26–27; emphasis mine). This claim about capitalism’s tendency to differentiate, rather than homogenize as Marx and Engels theorized, forms the nucleus of Robinson’s understanding of racial capitalism (Bhattacharrya, 2018, p. 11).
Although Robinson’s historical argument about the existence of racial hierarchies in feudal Europe is deeply contested, it does not compromise Robinson’s overarching conceptualization of racial capitalism.7 What makes Robinson’s understanding of racial capitalism attractive to BLM is not whether feudal Europe was constituted by racial hierarchies, but his distinctive structural account of capitalism. This unique understanding of capitalism helps Robinson theoretically elucidate the historical connections between race and capitalism.
Tracking the unfolding of the capitalist world-system in relation to the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, Robinson argues that assigning slave labor to a pre-capitalist stage of history is a mistake. In opposition to Marx’s developmentalism and characterization of slave labor as part of ‘primitive accumulation’,8 Robinson explains that slave labor persisted for three hundred years following the emergence of modern capitalism, and complemented ‘wage labour, peonage, serfdom and other methods of labour coercion’ (2000, p. 4). This focus on slavery opposes traditional Marxist accounts (see Wood, 1999; Post, 2012) in two ways: first, the privileged site of Marxist analysis is the relation between capital and ‘free’ wage-labor. In this respect, slave labor is seen as an anomaly to capitalism (since it is un-waged and ‘unfree’). Second, placing slavery as prior or external to capitalism means that the ‘Marxist critique of capitalism is unable to grasp the complex combination of both waged and un-waged labor that makes up the relations of production in modern capitalism’ (Lowe, 2015, p. 149; also see Banaji, 2003). Rather than locating colonization and the Atlantic slave trade outside the orbit of capitalism’s development, Robinson thus establishes the centrality of slavery and so-called extra-economic forms of coercion within the world-system of racial capitalism.
A salient feature of this account is that it underscores the historical importance of Black labor (especially in the form of racial slavery) in capitalism’s actual global development. Here, Robinson extends and builds on insights from what he terms ‘the Black radical tradition’, comprised of thinkers such as W.E.B Du Bois and C.L.R James. Thus, structurally, capitalism is racial capitalism: ‘the organization, expansion, and ideology of capitalist society was [and is] expressed through race, racial subjection, and racial differences’ (Lowe, 2015, p. 149; also see, Melamed, 2015; Kelley, 2017). One of the reasons why the framework of racial capitalism might be especially appealing to BLM, then, is that it overcomes the blindspot around race in Marx’s and Engels’s theorization of capitalism and in certain contemporary appropriations of Marx (see Melamed, 2015).
In contrast to Harvey’s and Brown’s separations of racial domination from neoliberalism, the framework of racial capitalism allows the policy platform to theoretically ground the connections between the histories and ongoing legacies of racialized expropriation such as slavery and colonialism and the contemporary material-economic situation of Black populations. Given BLM’s overall goal to expose and politicize anti-Black racism, it makes sense that the movement’s knowledge-practices employ racial capitalism, and not simply colorblind critiques of capitalism. More boldly, the main import of Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism for BLM is its ability to explain the persistence of racial domination within capitalist society without treating race as merely superstructural or irrelevant to regimes of capital accumulation.
Historicizing neoliberalism: outlining a critical theory of racial capitalism
The previous section explored the centrality of the notion of racial capitalism to BLM’s analyses of anti-Black oppression, highlighting why BLM turns to this notion. In this section, I engage with the framework of racial capitalism – not as an end in itself, but as a starting point – to better theorize neoliberalism. Here, I forward a preliminary sketch of a critical theory of racial capitalism, one that historicizes neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s longue durée.
In contrast to the externalization and separation of race from capitalism found in Harvey and Brown, the material substratum from which capital extracts surplus value, expropriates resources, and configures subjectivities is not a uniform, undifferentiated mass. Both land and human populations – foundational inputs for capital accumulation – have and continue to be carved up by racialized relations of power that appeared on a global scale with the colonial conquest of the Americas. In fact, European colonization of the Americas inaugurated a capitalist world-system that linked race, land, and the division of labor (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2005; Lugones, 2007).
The notion of racial capitalism comprehends the imbrication between regimes of capital accumulation and the racial-colonial domination of land and human populations. Indeed, the framework of racial capitalism highlights how capitalism works through a logic of wage-labor exploitation, while simultaneously relying on racialized and gendered logics of expropriation, ranging from the seizure of Indigenous lands to the extraction of surplus value via regimes of ‘unfree’ labor (slavery, debt peonage, convict leasing, gendered reproductive labor, etc.). In contrast, left analyses of neoliberalism that lack this perspective of racial capitalism are unable to grasp the qualitatively different mechanisms through which the land and labor of particular racialized populations, in distinction to ‘ideal’ (historically, ‘white’) citizen-workers, have and continue to be pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. Consequently, such critiques of neoliberalism fail to provide adequate explanations for why non-white racialized populations are asymmetrically affected by the violence of neoliberalism, perpetuating the norm of colorblind left critiques (see the introduction of Roediger, 2017). These critiques normatively universalize the experience of the white subject under neoliberalism, while depoliticizing and disavowing the markedly different experiences of non-white racialized populations. Finally, in terms of political praxis, such analyses lend themselves to either explicitly or implicitly casting racialized, gendered, and sexualized populations as concerned with ‘identity issues’ and impeding from the ‘real’ fight against capital.
Building blocks for a critical theory of racial capitalism
To avoid the pitfalls of critical accounts of neoliberalism identified in the first two sections and briefly reiterated above, it is imperative to develop a critical theory of racial capitalism. Such a theory has two goals: firstly, to theorize how race is central rather than epiphenomenal to the logic of capital, and, secondly, to account for racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence, underscoring how neoliberalism builds on these historical continuities.
Expanded understanding of capitalism
The first step in formulating a critical theory of racial capitalism entails broadening our understanding of capitalism beyond traditional Marxist accounts that largely center on the exploitation of wage-labor in the production process. This is necessary to grasp the structural ways capital relies on and is organized by racial domination and patriarchy. As a rich and diverse body of scholarship has revealed, focusing on the extraction of surplus value from ‘free’ labor offers an incomplete understanding of the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. Marxist feminists, for one, have noted how social reproduction, unpaid and deeply gendered, provides the necessary ‘background’ conditions for the exploitation of wage workers (Federici, 2004; Mies, 2014). Relatedly, M4BL’s policy platform argues that racial capitalism and various discriminatory institutions, practices, and laws in the United States have ‘for centuries’ denied Black populations ‘equal access to the wealth created by their labor’ (Movement for Black Lives, 2016). In other words, racialized economic disparities have often been driven by the absence of the wage-labor relation (Chen, 2013). Michael Dawson (2016), for instance, explains that race historically and contemporarily separates those ‘who possess the right to sell their labor and compete within markets’ (exploitation) and those that are ‘disposable, discriminated against, and ultimately either eliminated or superexploited’ (expropriation) (p. 151). Alongside capitalist exploitation, then, it is essential to account for the violent, ‘extra-economic’ forms of domination that have continually fueled capitalism. To better comprehend the interplay between capital accumulation, regimes of ‘free’/‘unfree’ labor, and the socio-political terrain, I thus conceptualize capitalism not as a narrow economic system, but as an ‘institutionalized social order’ (Fraser, 2014, 2016).
As a social order, capitalism relies as much on informal, abstract domination in the sphere of production as it does on the direct domination and appropriation of nature and the labor-power and resources of particular human populations (Moore, 2015). As Nancy Fraser (2014) argues, capitalism’s ‘front story’ of economic exploitation – characterized by private property in the means of production, ‘free’ labor, a systemic drive toward the self-expansion of value, and market mediation of inputs and outputs of production – is structurally dependent on the ‘back story’ of ‘non-economic’ or ‘extra-economic’ expropriation (pp. 60–68). In political-economic terms, capital’s core logic, that is capital’s systemic drive towards limitless expansion and profit-maximization, incentivizes expropriation, since expropriation allows capitalists to greatly reduce the cost of their inputs (in some cases to no cost at all) whether that be of labor-power or non-human resources. This structural proclivity for expropriation, built into capitalism, helps capitalists increase the rate of exploitation and combat the falling rate of profit (Fraser, 2016, p. 167). Expropriation is not anomalous to or a deviation from capitalism, but is integral to and produced by capital’s accumulative drive.
Race, history, and the logic of capital
The second step in sketching a critical theory of racial capitalism is to combine an expanded conception of capitalism with a historical frame that is attuned to changing yet persistent forms of racial domination. Here, I build on M4BL’s demand for reparations, especially their use of a longue durée framework.
Integrating these two artificially separated levels of analysis – the structure and history of capitalism – reveals how capital’s imperative for relentless accumulation, as Jodi Melamed (2015) contends, is predicated on the constant production of ‘relations of severe inequality among human groups…[capital] accumulation require(s) loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires’ (p. 77). In other words, capital’s tendency to differentiate, identified by Robinson and expressed in the partitioning of human populations in the form of race, ‘provides the indispensable material and ideological support, prop, or pedestal on which capitalism’s development depended and on which it continues to depend’ (Singh, 2016, pp. 37–38). This is to say that race orders, mediates, and configures capitalism’s exploitation and expropriation dialectic.
Of course, bringing the history of racial domination to bear on analyses of capitalism and showing how race is integral to and productive of capital’s logic, as BLM and the framework of racial capitalism does, is often met with skepticism. For example, as David Roediger observes, Harvey’s abstract and dehistoricized analysis of capital largely refashions Marxist scholar Ellen Wood’s broadly dominant contention that class is constitutive of capitalism in a way that race and gender are not (Roediger, 2017, p. 25). Notwithstanding the problems already identified with this partitioning, it is important to re-emphasize the arbitrary nature of excluding the history of racial domination and gender oppression from the logic of capital. As Peter Hudis (2018) states, ‘the logic of capital is in many respects inseparable from its historical development’ (p. 203). While the historical emergence of a colorblind capitalism may be imaginable, a historical materialist lens must concern itself not with ‘what could have occurred, but with what did and continues to occur’ (Hudis, 2018, p. 203).
Instead of separating analyses of capitalism, particularly capital’s logic, from analyses of racial domination, it is necessary to grasp the ways the capitalist world-system, since its inception, has been powered by a racialized dialectic of exploitation and expropriation. From this perspective, racial domination structures capital’s violence, and is visibly expressed in the exploitation and expropriation dialectic, the social division of labor, and the creation of what Chen (2013) labels ‘global surplus humanity’.
Neoliberalism in racial capitalism’s longue durée
Having surfaced capitalism’s racialized dialectic of exploitation and expropriation, a third step in developing a critical theory of racial capitalism is to track the historical mutations and continuities of this dialectic. For our purposes, I draw attention to two major historical continuities that extend into the neoliberal period. First, racialized non-white populations, always bounded within a historically specific context, undergird regimes of normative wage-labor and face forms of expropriation that exceed capitalist exploitation. And, second, the reproduction of the system of racial capitalism is only possible because of a cross-class alliance between political and economic elites and a portion of the working class brought together by white supremacy (Du Bois, 1998; Roediger, 2007; Olson, 2004). I emphasize these continuities because critiques of neoliberalism, in focusing on the ways neoliberalism is discontinuous from earlier phases of capitalism, too often hide the presence of these longstanding racialized patterns in the history and functioning of capitalism. This is not to say that racialized expropriation or the white supremacist cross-class alliance that reproduces capitalism is homogenous or takes the same form from one period of capital accumulation to the other. Instead, through a critical theory of racial capitalism, we can grasp both continuities and differences in capitalism’s history without obfuscating the former for the latter.
Importantly, it is only by historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s longue durée that racialized continuities become visible. In doing so, we can make better sense of why particular racialized populations are disproportionately affected by neoliberalism. Recall that this is the approach that BLM take in their policy platform. Although focused on contemporary anti-Black violence, the platform does not exceptionalize the present. BLM’s historical framing can be usefully extended to the ways neoliberalism is theorized. To more concretely elucidate this point, I briefly consider an illustrative example, namely the financial crisis of 2007/2008, an event considered by many scholars to epitomize neoliberalism and its logics of dispossession.
What is acknowledged but given less attention is that the subprime mortgage crisis hit Black and Latinx communities much earlier, while also devastating these communities at far higher rates than white communities. Citing a 2008 report by United for a Fair Economy, a research and advocacy group, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad (2009) note that between 1998 and 2007 ‘blacks lost $71 billion to $93 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans’.9 Pursuing an explanation for racialized subprime lending thus requires attending to the histories of redlining and housing segregation, New Deal sponsored white-flight and suburbanization, and the movement from financial exclusion to what Keanga-Yamhatta Taylor refers to as the ‘predatory inclusion of African Americans in the housing market’, which she traces to the housing and credit reforms in the late 1960s and 1970s (Taylor, 2019; also see Wang, 2018, pp. 125–150).
This inquiry itself must be located within a larger historical understanding of the prevalence of racialized debt regimes. Highlighting both continuities and discontinuities, Dawson and Francis (2016), for example, note how the debt encumbering Black populations under Jim Crow was bound up with the role of these populations as economic ‘producers’ (sharecropping and agricultural work and subsequently as industrial workers), while under neoliberalism ‘debt is primarily tied to blacks’ roles as consumers’ (p. 41). Dawson and Francis thus urge theorists to address the changing yet durable ways the capitalist credit-debt system, from Reconstruction to the neoliberal period, has been used to subordinate Black populations (pp. 38–41).
Taken broadly, left analyses of neoliberalism require a historical and structural framework such as that of a critical theory of racial capitalism sketched here to grasp the complex ways – simultaneously different and continuous – neoliberalism affects particular racialized populations. Absent such a framework, these critiques produce inaccurate generalizations about neoliberalism’s violence and political prescriptions that sideline those disproportionately affected by neoliberalism.
Conclusion
My sketch of a critical theory of racial capitalism opens up a number of prospects for future research. One promising line of inquiry, for instance, is to use the analytic of racial capitalism to bring the largely disparate theorizations of capitalism and slavery (Williams, 1994; Beckert, 2014; Johnson, 2013; Baptist, 2014; also see Hudson, 2016) and capitalism and settler colonialism (Coulthard, 2014; Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016; Dahl, 2018) into productive dialogue (see Day, 2015). Relatedly, it is critical to attend to the gendered and sexualized dimensions of racial capitalism, particularly in terms of the centrality of social reproduction (Davis, 1971; Morgan, 2004; Hartman, 2016). In this respect, future work on racial capitalism might illuminate the interrelations between settler colonialism, racial slavery and its afterlives, social reproduction, and capitalism. Such work would have to attend to the ways these interrelations mutate across different periods of capital accumulation, including an analysis of the neoliberal period.
This article, more modestly, has examined a foundational, albeit understudied, aspect of BLM’s understanding of anti-Black oppression, the concept of racial capitalism, and how this conceptual framework might help better theorize neoliberalism. I have suggested that a critical theory of racial capitalism can redress the deleterious theoretical and political consequences of Harvey’s and Brown’s critiques of neoliberalism that treat racial domination as an afterthought. My approach captures how racial domination in American society has been anchored to a specific historical regime of capital accumulation and simultaneously productive of that regime’s social relations of exploitation and expropriation. Consequently, the politics emergent from this understanding of racial capitalism troubles any easy binary between anti-capitalism and anti-racism.
Indeed, this framework offers a political rejoinder to sectors of the left that inadequately attend to the ways race and capitalism are connected. Firstly, in presenting racial domination as extraneous to the material and subjective relations of capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism, such analyses effectively unmoor racial domination from political economy. This cedes ground to psychologistic, attitudinal, and individualized conceptions of racial domination, producing forms of anti-racism largely concerned with individual prejudice. Against this disaggregation of race from capitalism, the critical theory of racial capitalism sketched here identifies the precise ways race and other ‘identity-categories’ are rooted in and condition the material functioning of capitalism.10
Second, instead of blaming struggles around race, gender, and sexuality as breaking up an imagined ‘unity’ and distracting from an authentic, ‘real’ struggle, the lens of racial capitalism calls into question the existence of an organically unified proletariat or working class. Working through a logic of differentiation, rather than homogenization, the framework of racial capitalism reveals how ‘free’ wage-labor exploitation is predicated on racialized and gendered regimes of expropriation. Interrupting the persistent reproduction of racial capitalism – a regime held together by the cross-class glue of white supremacy – must thus involve intense effort to bridge the exploitation and expropriation continuum. Of course, building solidarity to bridge this continuum requires political organizing that is committed to both anti-racism and anti-capitalism.
Finally, an analysis of racial capitalism is especially valuable because it offers a more unified framework to understand the relations between race and the logics of capital accumulation. Such a framework provides a theoretical foundation for why anti-racism needs to be central, rather than an afterthought, to anti-capitalist politics. While the sentiment held by many on the left in 2016 (this holds, in some ways, for 2020 too) was the need for the movement supporting Bernie Sanders and BLM to ‘cross-fertilize’ (Fraser, 2016, p. 178), my theorization of racial capitalism offers a more nuanced approach to the problem. Instead of hoping for these two movements to align, keeping in mind that these movements are not mutually exclusive but have significant overlaps, a critical theory of racial capitalism invites the mainstream left to re-orient their analysis of race and capitalism by engaging with the knowledge-practices of BLM and the Black radical tradition more broadly. This article has taken a step in that direction, outlining how the framework of racial capitalism shifts and expands more traditional understandings of capitalism. A critical theory of racial capitalism thus offers the possibility to move past both colorblind analyses of capitalism and the entrenched class-versus-identity debate that has for decades roiled the American left.
Notes
1
The term ‘Black Lives Matter’ is the most commonly used name for the movement; however, the Black Lives Matter Global Network, founded by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors-Khan, is one organization within a larger coalition of organizations comprising the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). Barbara Ransby (2018), for instance, uses the combined term BLMM/M4BL to encompass ‘both affiliated and unaffiliated forces that have emerged or gained traction post-2012, through their protests and organizing efforts against anti-Black racism’ (2018, p. 4). This article uses the ordinary language term for the movement as a whole, namely Black Lives Matter or BLM. When drawing on documents produced by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), I stick to M4BL.
2
In Making All Black Lives Matter, Ransby notes, ‘the majority consensus within BLMM/M4BL circles builds on Cedric Robinson’s assessment of racial capitalism as one of the foundations of Black social and economic oppression’ (2018, pp. 117–118). For a genealogy of ‘racial capitalism’, see Hudson (2018).
3
Importantly, scholars such as Dawson and Francis (2016), Spence (2015), and Soss, Fording, and Schram (2011) have examined various aspects of the intersection between racial domination, on the one hand, and neoliberal ideology, governmentality, and paternalism on the other. While departing from Harvey’s and Brown’s analyses by focusing on race and neoliberalism, these scholars nevertheless either, implicitly or explicitly, build on Harvey’s and Brown’s work or, at the very least, do not directly interrogate the effects of Harvey's and Brown's sidelining race. My project, however, takes a different tack: rather than simply rejecting or supplementing Harvey’s and Brown’s critiques, I flesh out the theoretical and political implications of their respective treatments of race, given their widespread influence in critical political theory.
4
Dean (2015) observes a similar historical narrative – one that pits an authentic left against a left fragmented by anti-racist, feminist, and queer movements – in the work of thinkers such as Jodi Dean, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou.
5
In her latest work, Brown (2019) revises her earlier understanding of neoliberalism – a ‘moral-political’ project, rather than a political rationality – revealing how neoliberalism preserves traditional hierarchies by muzzling democratic institutions (p. 11). Central to Brown’s investigation is the conjunction of neoliberal rationality, neoliberal economic policies, and ‘wounded’ and ‘aggrieved’ ‘white male supremacism’, and how these forces propelled the hard Right to power in the United States and western Europe (p. 10; p. 171). Although Brown better illuminates how neoliberalism works in tandem with and protects national, racial, gender, and religious hierarchies, her analysis continues to problematically separate the operations of neoliberalism from these hierarchies. Brown’s periodization of ‘nihilistic’ and ‘wounded’ white male supremacy as peculiar to neoliberalism and outwardly manifesting during this period also hides the longer historical entanglement of white supremacy, capitalism, and liberalism (see chapter 5). In short, Brown’s view of ‘aggrieved’ white male supremacy, based as it is on a modified reading of Nietzschean ressentiment, continues to uncouple racial domination from the functioning of neoliberalism as a regime of capital accumulation. By locating contemporary white supremacy as a psychic expression of perceived loss of status, Brown leaves unanswered where white masculine entitlement, economic or otherwise comes from. As a number of scholars have argued (Harris, 1993; Mills, 1997; Singh, 2017) whiteness and white supremacy in the United States emerge and are closely linked to slavery, settler colonialism, and liberal-capitalist property relations. Hence, it is crucial to situate neoliberalism, including its intersection with contemporary white supremacy, within this longer history.
6
The most recognizable theoretical influence on BLM is the concept of ‘intersectionality’. From its inception, BLM has self-identified as an ‘intersectional’ movement, explicitly drawing on Black feminisms in its analyses of anti-Black oppression (Garza, 2014; Ransby, 2018).
7
The dominant position in critical race theory is that racism is a modern phenomenon (Omi and Winant, 2014; Mills, 1997). That said, there remains a significant and growing body of scholarship that insists on seeing the European Middle Ages as racialized (Mignolo, 2005; West, 2001; Heng, 2018).
8
Instead of theorizing the primitive accumulation of capital as occurring before capitalism proper, a number of scholars have broken with Marx’s stage-ist and teleological understanding, conceptualizing primitive accumulation as an ongoing aspect of capital accumulation (for an excellent overview of these accounts, see Nichols, 2015; Ince, 2017).
9
Harvey (2010) cites this same number and states that public officials and the media turned a blind eye to the increased rate of foreclosures in cities like Detroit and Cleveland because ‘the people affected were low income, mainly African-American, immigrant (Hispanics), or women single-headed households’ (p. 1). However, he does not explain why these communities were disproportionately targeted by financial institutions.
10
This is not the same as saying that white supremacist racial domination is simply an effect of or reducible to political economy (see Myers, 2017; Wilderson III, 2003).
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Acknowledgements
I am thankful to Lisa Disch and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. I am also grateful to participants at the Abolition Collective’s Inaugural Convergence in 2017, the Western Political Science Association 2018 meeting, and the University of Chicago’s Race and Capitalism Graduate Conference in 2018, and to Nick Xenos, Yasmeen Daifallah, Sonia Alvarez, Adam Dahl, John McMahon, Rachel Brown, Basil Zeno, Sean Gordon, James Padilioni, Rob Echeverria, and Lars Cornelissen for their feedback.
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University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA
Siddhant Issar
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Correspondence to Siddhant Issar.
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Issar, S. Listening to Black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism. Contemp Polit Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00399-0
