Racialized Capitalism: An Account of Its Contested Origins and Consolidation

Sociology: Partitioning Knowledge, Occluding Racism

Sociology has an origin myth of inherent radicalism and a critical outlook.
Sociologists supposedly instinctively side with the underdog (Becker, 1967).
Alain Touraine (2007) claimed sociology is about ‘resistance to all forms of power’.
Margaret Archer claimed Catholic teaching is sociological because it is left-wing (Dawson, 2015, p. 110).
Sociology is believed to contribute to emancipation (Feagin & Vera, 2011).
Michael Burawoy's 2004 Presidential Address called for sociologists to rediscover their radical edge.
However, this narrative conceals the dominant Social Darwinian, cultural evolutionary, and eugenicist perspectives of founding US sociologists.
These perspectives reinforced racist discriminatory practices against African Americans and other ‘lesser races’.
The discipline marginalized emancipatory African American thought, particularly that of W. E. B. Du Bois (Morris, 2016) and Oliver Cromwell Cox (Hier, 2001).
Bhambra (2014) distinguishes between ‘two traditions’ in sociology – one black, the other white.
The social struggles of 1968 democratized Anglo-American sociology, leading to critical scholarship on racism.
Key scholars include Blauner (1969), Bonacich (1972), CCCS (1982), Gilroy (1987), Hall (1980, 1986), Hill-Collins (1990), Miles (1982, 1989), Omi & Winant (1986/1995), and Wilson (1978).
This scholarship institutionalized race and racism studies within sociology.
However, this body of work has remained contained within the ‘race’ box, minimally influencing other core areas of sociology.
British sociology's study of social class has largely ignored the theoretical implications of race and class scholarship (Bhattacharyya, 2015; Hall, 1980; Miles, 1982; Virdee, 2014).
Some sociologists question the significance of racism beyond the United States.
Migration studies have sealed themselves off from racism studies (Erel, Murji, & Nahaboo, 2016).
This neglect is partly structural, tracing back to the spatial bifurcation of social sciences in the late 19th century (Wallerstein, 1998).
Sociology focused on the West, while anthropology and ‘Oriental studies’ focused on the rest of the world.
This division occluded colonialism and racism, leaving sociologists ill-equipped to understand their consequences.
Sociological theories added further layers of obfuscating knowledge about the rest of the world in opposition to the West.
Stadial and modernization theories understood history as progressing in stages, with the West representing the highest point of development (Bhambra, 2007a, p. 34).
Social change was understood as driven by factors endogenous to Europe (Bhambra, 2007a, p. 5).
Habermas’s (1990) account of modernity focuses on intra-European phenomena, neglecting the ‘underside of modernity’ (Dussel, 1996).

Postcolonial Sociology: Its Contribution and Limitations

Postcolonial theory aims to reconstruct modernity by addressing what is missing in sociology: an engagement with difference (Bhambra, 2007b, pp. 878, 880).
It makes transparent the colonial underside through a systematic consideration of dispossession, appropriation, genocide, and enslavement (Bhambra, 2016, p. 962).
This contributes to a fuller account of the non-European world's role in modernity.
Bhambra debunks the ‘European ownership of modernity’ using the ‘connected histories’ perspective (Subrahmanyam).
She demonstrates the culturally syncretic roots of the Renaissance and the significance of dispossession and enslavement in commercial growth (Bhambra, 2007a, p. 137).
Postcolonial sociology has analytic blind spots, imposing an artificial homogeneity on Europe.
It reduces Europe to a monolithic bloc, flattening history and ignoring conflicts within and beyond Europe.
The theoretical approach pivots around a single binary axis of power: colonized versus colonizer (McClintock, 1992).
Colonialism occurred within Europe as well as beyond its boundaries.
There was always an East within the West and a South within the North.
Regions of Europe, such as Ireland and Cyprus, were colonized in the making of other nation-states.
Cedric Robinson (1983) claimed the first modern racial subjects were European, including the Catholic Irish, Slavs, and Jews.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Roma racism indicate multiple modalities of racism, not all color-coded or reducible to colonialism (Miles, 1993).
Homogenizing Europe obscures the multiple routes through which racism was made, underestimating its significance.
Capturing the distinctive pathways requires confronting the ‘postcolonial unconscious’ by denaturalizing capitalism (Lazarus, 2011).
Colonization and racism should be located within the unfolding story of historical capitalism.
This entangles racism with questions of class, gender, and national belonging.

$Social change and power relations; restoring agency to sociological analysis; to ‘denaturalizing’ social conditions by seeing paths that shaped them and the ways in which they might have been otherwise.$

Fully grasping racism requires deepening postcolonial sociology’s efforts to move beyond disciplinary boundaries.
This involves overcoming the spatial and temporal bifurcation through a wilful entanglement of sociology with history.

$the interplay among causal mechanisms, idiosyncratic events and powerful contingencies$

A ‘historical turn’ requires removing collective blinkers and rethinking sociology.
This entails reunifying the domain of knowledge, including history (Wallerstein, 2000, p. 34).

$all useful descriptions of social reality are necessarily simultaneously historical (that is, they take into account not only the specificity of the situation but the continual and endless changes in the structures under study as well as in their environing structures) and ‘social scientific’ (that is, they search for structural explanations of the longue durée, the explanations for which however are not and cannot be eternal).$

Thinking Racialized Capitalism, or, the Valorization of Capital and the Racialization of Labour

Marx demonstrated that capitalism is the defining feature of modernity (Sayer, 1991, p. 12).
Capitalism is a revolutionary mode of production distinguished by the valorization of capital (Heinrich, 2012, p. 16).
Unlike pre-capitalist formations (C-M-C), capitalism involves purchasing commodities to realize more money (M-C-M).
Competition between individual capitalists is built into the system (Sayer, 1991, p. 29).
The system's dynamism and growth capacity lead to an endless quest for markets and raw materials.
Capitalism gathers ever more parts of the world into a network of uneven material exchanges (Hoogvelt, 2001, p. 14).
This gives rise to a capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein, 1979).
Capitalism generates unprecedented levels of turbulence by combining with labor to realize surplus value.
It wrenches labor violently from established local moral economies (countryside to town).
Existing social relations are torn apart, and naturalized hierarchies no longer fix people in place.
Capitalism is a disrupter, dismantling social relations and generating new antagonisms.

$uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air …$

Marx believed the principal antagonism was between bourgeois and proletarian classes.
However, his account is unencumbered by questions of racism, sexism, and uneven development.
Marx grasped the centrality of colonialism and the genocidal treatment of non-Europeans (Marx, 1976, p. 915).
He claimed ‘capital, comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Marx, 1976, p. 926).
He commented on racist bifurcations within the proletariat.

$Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded$

He called for decolonization in Ireland as a precondition for socialism in Britain (Anderson, 2016).
However, such insights were never incorporated into his theoretical account of industrial capitalism.
Marx understood conflicts and differences as remnants of a dying feudal order.

$capitalist modernity has always advanced as much by way of the production and negotiation of difference as it has through enforcing sameness, standardization and homogenization$

Redressing Marx's account requires dialogue with black Marxism (Robinson, 1983) and Marxist feminism (Federici, 2004; Lowe, 1996).
Capitalism's dynamism destabilizes the old order, obstructing capital accumulation.
The state intervenes to stabilize the capitalist order through repressive apparatuses and ideological production of social difference (Lowe, 1996).
Capitalist states maximize profits not by rendering labour abstract but by entangling profit maximization with the social production of difference.
This process creates a new hierarchical ordering of the subaltern population, legitimizing further degradation through super-exploitation.
The structural and symbolic chasm secures stability for the capitalist world-system, preventing working-class consciousness (Leibowitz, 2003).

$they are practices which secure the hegemony of a dominant group … in such a way as to dominate the whole social formation in a form favourable to the long-term development of the economic productive base$

Wherever capitalism set root, it sought, exploited, needed, and created difference (Roediger, 2017, p. 26).

$capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations. … If capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat.$

Theorizing Subaltern Resistance and the Question of Agency

The only check upon oppression is the strength and effectiveness of resistance to it (Fields & Fields, 2012, p. 123).
Our conceptualization must integrate accounts of the ways racialized subalterns and the working class responded to racism and capitalist domination.

$[t]he working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.$

Understanding class owes as much to agency as it does to objectivist criteria.
It focuses on structures of feeling and consciousness that help workers understand they are a class.
Collective action is dependent on the scale of the organizational infrastructure that can be drawn upon to facilitate mobilization.
Opportunities to extract concessions only arise in periods of system-wide crisis.

$intervals of indeterminacy are [the] times when the boundary conditions of politics are renegotiated and reset$

This is not an account of modernity that can be written in the literary genre of romance.
Subaltern defeat paves the way for the further consolidation of capitalist rule, including through racism.
Capitalism is a counter-revolution (Federici, 2004, p. 21) whose expansion has rested on extinguishing the emancipatory visions of subaltern populations.
Demonstrating the work racism accomplishes requires moving from abstraction to the historically concrete.
Principal driver of English colonization was the crisis of accumulation arising from long-term economic decline of feudalism.
Racism emerged hand in hand with such colonization.
Developments in Virginia capture the entanglement of colonization, class struggles, and racism within the emergent capitalist order (Allen, 1997; Billings, 1991).
The earliest English settlers in Virginia comprised a small band of wealthy capitalists along with a large workforce of indentured servants contracted to a so-called master for between five and seven years (Billings, 1991).
The first group of 20 Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619.
Securing appropriate levels of financial return from the establishment of tobacco plantations was no easy matter for the colonial elite.
Alongside the regular bouts of conflict with the Algonquian peoples whose land they had expropriated, the colonists suffered badly from famine and disease in the swamp-ridden landscape.
African and English indentured labourers were subject to unprecedented forms of exploitation where they could be ‘beaten, maimed, and even killed with impunity (Fields & Fields, 2012, p. 122).'
English and African laborers regularly conjoined to escape the Jamestown compound, often to link up with the Algonquian peoples.
These affective ties cemented through sex, marriage and the children that resulted.
With the surplus threatened by a persistently non-compliant multi-ethnic labor force, the apparatuses of the colonial state set about finding mechanisms that would restore social order and facilitate the smoother accumulation of surplus.
Court records from the 1640s reveal how members of the Virginia legislative assembly turned to sifting the workforce using the relational categorization of English and ‘Negro.’
They pulled from the feudal regime in England the already existing racialized representation of the African as ‘Negro.’
The colonial state to structurally and symbolically position laborers of African descent below those of English descent in a reconstituted hierarchical division of labor.
Differential punishments were enforced against runaways, with Africans invariably sentenced to servitude for life while English runaways tended to have their time extended.
While the penalty for marriage between labourers was an additional year of servitude, the heaviest punishments were reserved for English women who bore children of an African father, with service being extended by as much as seven years and accompanied by a public whipping (Allen, 1997).
A law was passed in the early 1660s against a child inheriting their father’s status, as English common law had long dictated, to ensure that the children fathered by English men with African women would be born unfree.
By implication, children born of an English mother and an African father would be technically free, so the legislation also came laced with a warning to English women who chose to marry Africans that they ‘were forgetting their free condition and disgracing their nation’ (Fields & Fields, 2012, p. 130).
By 1667, even baptism into the Christian faith could not save the African from such inhuman bondage (Billings, 1973, p. 470).
Within half a century of the English colonization of Virginia.
encoding of the category ‘Negro’ in law was a formative moment in this racialization process because a darker skin complexion was explicitly used to distinguish labourers of African descent from those of English descent.
And it is deserving of the classification racism because in this new hierarchical order of labor any possibility of the African changing their status was made impossible because difference had become essentialized through the racialization of ancestry.
Existing regimes of racialized representation acquired a material force that they had hitherto lacked in world history because they were wilfully entangled with the central objectives of plantation society – commodity production and profit maximization.

How Virginia’s English Labourers Became White

While the colonial elite were sifting and hierarchically re-ordering the multi-ethnic labour force from as early as the 1640s, it was not until the 1680s that English labourers as a social group came to fully embrace such a racialized order.
This self-actualized break occurs in the aftermath of the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when 1000 English and African labourers rose up in armed rebellion against the Governor William Berkeley.
From the 1680s, racism not only did its work through the signification of the categories ‘English’ and ‘Negro’ but the related categorizations of ‘white’ and ‘black’.
Legislators began to differentiate the labouring population using colour as a sorting mechanism.
Terms like ‘Christian woman’ and ‘Christian indentured servants’ were now prefixed with ‘white.’
Within the space of three generations, the vocabulary of difference shifted decisively from that based on religion and racialized ancestry to one informed by an explicit colour-coded racism.
The success of white supremacy in affectively attaching the English labourer to the colonial elite was bound up with the imperialist expansion of the plantation economy westwards (Roediger, 2017).
Accompanying the invention of a ‘screen of racial contempt’ were material advantages such as the ownership of land, the freedom to move freely without a pass, and, to marry without upper class consent (Allen, 1997, p. 17).
Over the course of the 18th century, the consolidation of capitalism secured through the exponential growth in procurement of labour from West Africa meant that such labour found itself entering an American arena where their denuded slave status was already codified in law and where ‘the trace of colour’ denoted ‘the trace of slavery’ (Vaughn, 1989, p. 318).

$to banish: whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a Negro, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free.$

The recalibration of the moral worth of English and African labouring lives generated a structural and symbolic chasm that could no longer be bridged.

Within a few years, the Virginian elites were convinced that ‘no white servant … no matter how poor, how badly treated could identify with frightened Africans’ (cited in Vaughn, 1989, p. 335).
While racism was a class project of the English colonial state, its ultimate success rested on subaltern assent.
From this moment on, the expansion of rights and liberties for white labourers in the colonies was made dependent on the confirmation of the hereditary slave status of the African.
Over the course of the 18th century, the descendants of the original English subalterns began to understand themselves not only as English and Protestant but white.
The social processes and mechanisms which helped birth racism in Virginia were reproduced across the 13 colonies of colonial English America and the Caribbean, as well as in South Asia and Africa.
The French quickly followed suit with the introduction of a Code Noir in 1685.
This process of elite European ‘learning’ is what makes racism such a central ‘cultural pillar of historical capitalism’ (Wallerstein, 1979, p. 80).

Industrial Capitalism, Class Struggles and the Racialization of the British Interior

The racialization of the European-descended subaltern in the British interior is a theme rarely broached in postcolonial sociological accounts.
Locating an understanding of racism within the unfolding story of historical capitalism allows us to prise apart the artificial cross-class homogeneity that the former approach sometimes imposes and create a conceptual space to investigate the significance of internal class struggles in stimulating elite efforts into racializing parts of the subaltern within the British interior as a means of stabilizing the ascending social relations of industrial capitalism.
The foundations of this industrial capitalism lay not only in slavery and colonialism abroad but enclosure at home.
Over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, social property relations were transformed throughout much of rural England, with many of the former peasants reduced to the status of abject proletarians (Thompson, 1991, p. 218).
This process of divorcing peasants from the means of production was compounded by a war on women.
When they fought to maintain control over reproduction, the apparatuses of the state instituted ‘severe penalties against contraception, abortion and infanticide’ (Federici, 2004, p. 88).

$accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class$

The elites considered this English poor to be a disposable population.

And so, many of these so-called vagabonds and vagrants along with others found themselves snatched and transported across the Atlantic to be put to work as indentured servants in the colonies of the Chesapeake region of the US as well as the Caribbean.
Yet, an attentiveness to time and space reveals that no such option presented itself to the subaltern within Britain itself for well over a century after the British-descended labourer abroad had become white.
The returns from agricultural capitalism within Britain combined with those from slavery and colonialism abroad were decisive in kickstarting the Industrial Revolution which only added to the misery and stigmatization of Britain’s poor.
Against a backdrop of long-standing structural and symbolic violence involving dispossession, proletarianization and stigmatization, this subaltern class were now pulled from the countryside to work in the engine-room of the new industrial capitalism in what William Blake so aptly described as the ‘dark satanic mills.’
The industrial working class of Britain was a multi-ethnic proletariat from its inception.
TheIndustrial Revolution had coincided with revolutions in France in 1789 and Haiti in 1791 – the latter demonstrating that it was the self-activity of African slaves which forced the revolutionary regime in France into issuing a decree abolishing slavery premised on the ‘aristocracy of the skin’ (James, 2001) thereby actualizing the promise of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ to everyone.
Their objective was nothing less than to transform ‘the mob’ ‘by education and agitation’ from ‘followers of the camp’ to followers of ‘the standard of liberty’ (Thompson, 1991, p. 109).
Olaudah Equiano brought first-hand experience of slaveryto the attention of the British public through the corresponding societies.
It was a freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, who brought first-hand experience of slavery to the attention of the British public with his remarkable autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).
For more than half a century, this multi-ethnic proletariat refused to bend to the will of capitalist discipline.

$where there is discontent or a disposition to combine or turn-out among the workpeople, the Irish are the leaders. They are the most difficult to reason with and convince on the subject of wages and regulations.$

The imperial British state found itself confronted with a similar dilemma to their colonial arm in Virginia more than a century earlier, namely, how to contain an insurgent multi- ethnic working class that was posing a serious threat to social order and disrupting the smooth accumulation of capital.

While the principal response from the state remained that of repression with workers jailed, deported to the colonies while their organizations were outlawed (Virdee, 2014), also discernible was the deployment of a class racism (Balibar, 1988) which categorized the proletariat as ‘a distinct physical type.’
The aim of the early Enlightenment thinkers had been nothing less than to sweep away the idea that the world was ordered according to God’s will and craft a new moral and philosophical attitude informed by a secular outlook and reasoned judgement based on observation.
For the intellectual elites of Western Europe, the ongoing project of colonial conquest became a live data-set, a human zoo from which they distilled their magical theories of scientific racism.
What these theories of scientific racism shared in common was an understanding that: (1) humans could be sorted into a finite number of racial groups using a limited set of physical markers; (2) these groups were endowed with differing capacities for cultural development with Whites ranked at the top of this racial order and sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom; (3) each group’s capacity for civilization was fixed and immutable over time and space such that African and Asian societies were effectively imagined as lying in a state of arrested development akin to European societies at an earlier stage in their civilization (Virdee, 2014).
All European nations were held to be a composite of such races and the ‘proportion of the mix of superior and inferior races was said to determine the position of the nation on the scale of superiority and inferiority’ (Miles, 1989, p. 114).
Those of Irish Catholic descent found themselves doubly excluded from the imagined national community as Catholics and as members of a so-called inferior race of Celts.
These racist regimes of representation were further articulated to gender (Hall, McClelland, & Rendell, 2000) as well as a discourse of respectability to ensure that only Anglo-Saxon working men of good standing could lay claim to being British. The one notable concession of course was that scientific racism was entangled right from the outset with processes of partial democratization of the internal national polity and it helped determine (along with sexism) who from within the subaltern class would be remade as active citizens of the imperial state – in the colony of Virginia, we saw that privileged stratum was white men while in Victorian Britain itself it became Anglo-Saxon men.

Socialist Nationalism as Racialized Identity Politics

Despite Marx and Engels’ (2010) call for proletarians of all countries to unite, large parts of the European socialist movement, including within Britain, spent much of the 20th century repudiating such advice.
Another critical determinative mechanism through which racism consolidated its hold, in this instance over much of Europe’s subaltern population, was the project of socialist nationalism.
The idea of the nation operated as a power container (Giddens, 1987), limiting the political imagination of these representatives of the exploited and oppressed.
Many contemporary socialists and sociologists interpret this period defined by its bipartisan commitment to a common citizenship and the welfare settlement as a model of the ethical society we ought to aspire to today.
Attachment to the twin racializing projects of imperial and socialist nationalism was so comprehensive in this moment that there was simply no institutional space in British political culture to make sense of the migrant presence from a progressive standpoint.
Contemporary socialists and sociologists view this period of bipartisan commitment to common citizenship and welfare as a model ethical society.
This should be understood as a form of racialized identity politics.

Conclusion

Racism formed an indispensable weapon in the armoury of state elites, used to limit multi-ethnic cooperation and contain the class struggles waged by subaltern populations.
Of central importance to the ‘success’ of such racism is the extent to which it can secure the acquiescence of parts of the subaltern class.
A further virtue of situating an account of racism within the unfolding story of historical capitalism as against the postcolonial tendency to ground it within the civilizational encounter between the West and the Rest is that it helps make transparent the plurality of racisms, including the racialization (and later de-racialization) of parts of the European descended proletariat.
In 19th-century Britain, the multi-ethnic proletariat was principally differentiated and hierarchically re-ordered through an articulation between an imperial British nationalism and the racialized signifiers of Anglo-Saxon and Irish Celt.
There was no simultaneous incorporation of the European-descended subaltern into whiteness across time and space.
The subaltern within Western Europe itself had available to it institutional structures and narratives which eventually secured its inclusion as active citizens of imperial nation-states.
Of central importance in Britain was the dominant tendency of the socialist movement to legitimize their demands for working class inclusion on the terrain of the already racialized nation.
Socialist nationalism was, and remains, a contradictory phenomenon simultaneously accompanying its mission of democratization with the consolidation of new racisms.
Emancipatory politics has important implications for challenges against the global proletariat.
A race-blind counter-hegemonic politics risks leaving untouched the deeply embedded injustices of historic and contemporaneous racisms.
British history can help illuminate the formative role played in such transformative politics by those parts of the working class deemed ‘racially’ incompatible with both elite and socialist conceptions of British nationalism.
Thatcherism was only the latest reincarnation of the capitalist counter-revolution, which in this instance helped secure the hegemony of neoliberalism by defeating the increasingly entangled social movements against racism and sexism and for working class justice that were hinting at a different way of arranging social relations.
In the aftermath of the 2008 recession and the resulting imposition of austerity, Britain is a state in which a brutal class war is being waged against ever more strata of the working class (Tyler, 2013).
Raymond Williams (1989, p. 118) once remarked that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’. And there is hope.