Articles

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

This essay explores four questions through a critical dialogue with Black Marxist, Decolonial, and Political Marxist accounts of racism. First, is it possible to speak of racism before the advent of colonisation in the Americas? Second, what were the determinants for the production of these earlier modalities of racism? Third, who were the key actors responsible for the production of such racism? And fourth, what were the linkages between these developments and racisms that would unfold with the capitalist colonisation of the Americas? I contend that the historical formation of racism as a material force lies in the formation and dissolution of absolutist states in Western Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. By demonstrating how the political cultures of Western European societies were suffused with the logic of racialisation prior to the colonisation of the Americas, the essay helps make transparent hitherto occluded connections between histories focusing on the internal racialisation of Europe and the racialisation of the European exterior. And in doing so, it establishes the constitutive part racism played in the emergence of capitalist modernity.

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

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

This introduction cannot encapsulate the diversity and breadth of Marxist writing about race and racism. Yet it does attempt, at the very least, to give an idea of the seriousness with which Marxists have historically taken these issues. Far from just an ‘epiphenomenon’, many in the Marxist tradition have sought to significantly extend historical materialist theory in order to specifically understand race and racism. In some ways, however, the mature neoliberal period saw something of a retreat from these positions: with greater emphasis placed on the category of race as one simply opposed to Marxist analysis.The articles in this special issue need to be understood against this wider context. Eschewing overly binary discussions about the ‘competition’ between ‘race’ and ‘class’, they instead represent more specific interventions – on both the theoretical and historical level – into these questions. Whilst the contributions are of course varied, we can understand them as responding directly to many of the questions we post in this introduction. These interventions are multifaceted and intertwined. And yet, despite their interconnectedness, it was necessary to place these interventions into themes, to provide some structure and coherence to the discussion. Some themes were more bounded than others, but even those that were more narrowly defined were often overlapping and interconnected. It was a delicate balancing act that required careful consideration. Given the sheer size of this special issue, it will be covered over two physical issues. The first will contain the articles under the theme of Race and Capital and Colony, while the second issue will look the areas of Ideology, Chains, and Labour.

By Alessandra Mezzadri, SOAS

HM Conference Plenary, Sunday November 13th, 2022

First, I would like to thank the HM conference organisers – Demet Dinler in particular- for arranging this panel. Thanks to my fellow panellists for sharing this platform with me – I find their work hugely inspiring. I was asked to organise my intervention here along three questions, which I diligently have.