Raced Markets: An Introduction

Abstract

The consensus from the Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that race, initially a European invention for colonization, has become material through raced markets in the global political economy.
The rise of fascistic movements requires understanding race's structural and agential functions in reproducing raced markets and social conditions.
This special issue aims to analyze neoliberalism through a raced market lens, referencing marginalized thought traditions that view race as productive and material.

Keywords

Race
Neoliberalism
Political Economy
Raced Markets
Trump
Brexit
Grenfell

Fanon Quote

"[T]he economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich" (Fanon 1963: 31).

Grenfell Tower Disaster

In June 2017, a fire in Grenfell Tower, a predominantly social-housing high-rise in North Kensington, West London, resulted in seventy-one deaths.
The victims were mainly Black and minority ethnic members of London's impoverished population.
The disaster was attributed to neoliberal urbanism, including:
- Lackluster attention to regulations.
- Deficient accountability from tenant management organizations outsourcing renovations to the lowest bidder.
- Gentrification and the decline of social-housing stock.
Demonstrates the racialization of UK housing policy, where Black and minority ethnic residents are more likely to live in poor-quality housing.
Reflects a global reality where racialized 'Others of Europe' are impoverished, marginalized, and excluded from dignified housing.

Brexit and Anti-Immigration Sentiment

The 'leave' campaign for Brexit was structured around racial imaginaries of reclaimed sovereignty.
Incidents during the campaign included the murder of anti-racism campaigner Jo Cox by a white supremacist and the unveiling of a UKIP poster featuring Syrian asylum seekers with the text 'Breaking Point'.
After the vote, anti-immigration sentiment intensified, leading to racist and xenophobic abuse against people of color, especially Muslim women, and foreign-accented individuals.

Theresa May's Response to Brexit

Prime Minister Theresa May claimed neoliberalism was not working for all citizens and shifted the discourse towards serving the 'ordinary working class'.
Conventional wisdom suggests focusing on the 'white working class' 'left behind' by neoliberalism to counter right-populism.
Some Brexit architects were old Thatcherites and Atlanticists.

Trump's Presidential Campaign

Mirrored Brexit with promises to 'make America great again,' appealing to fictional histories.
His election win emboldened far-right elements, leading to racist violence.
Executive orders negated hopes of moderation.
Hillary Clinton's loss was attributed to the retaliation against neoliberalism's failure to deliver for all, particularly the 'white working class' in rust-belt America.
Race and class returned to the focus of analysis, with the 'white working class' deployed as the economic rationale for populist political projects.

Race and Neoliberalism in Political Economy

Critical political economy must engage with race to adequately respond to the crises of neoliberalism.
Race has received relatively less critical attention in political economy compared to gender and class, despite extensive literature by racialized and colonized intellectuals.
Neoliberalism has been thoroughly examined, with some scholars focusing on material understandings of the global political economy and others on its discursive understandings as a form of rationality.

Genealogies of Neoliberalism

Materialist readings trace neoliberalism's rise against corporate liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s, which involved capital's compromise with organized labor and a redistributive welfare state.
Neoliberalism began as an abstract doctrine emphasizing prosperity through free markets, free trade, and secured property rights.
The first experiments were in Pinochet’s Chile, implemented by the 'Chicago boys' under Milton Friedman, reorganizing capital, labor, and the state.
Figures like Volcker, Thatcher, and Reagan replicated elements of the Chilean experiment in the North Atlantic, emphasizing deregulation and the state's role as a securer of property rights.

Post-Structural Understandings of Neoliberalism

Scholars informed by post-structuralism, such as Wendy Brown, understand neoliberalism as a mode of reason extending beyond policy.
Within this mode, all actions are understood as market conduct, and political domains as marketplaces.
The neoliberal economization of conduct quantifies life aspects through metrics.
Brown critiques the anti-democratic nature of this economization, arguing that even retracting neoliberal policies may not end neoliberal reasoning.
Neoliberalism is seen as fundamentally contradictory to liberal democracy and was birthed as a reaction to fascism.

William Davies on Trump and Brexit

William Davies views the Trump and Brexit movements as diametrically opposed to the economic common sense of neoliberalism.
These movements defy economic rationality and experts, indicating a shift.
This special issue challenges the presentation of neoliberalism as inversely related to fascistic politics.

Absence of Race in Neoliberalism Analysis

Despite varying scholarly understandings of neoliberalism, none afford analytical importance to 'race'.
This reticence may arise from the legacies of scientific racism, as claiming 'materiality' on behalf of race risks eugenicist positions.
Stuart Hall consigned race to the ideological dimension of capitalist crisis, entrenching a divide between class as materiality and race as ideology.

Race as a Mode of Classification

Race cannot be reduced to an ideology of racism but must be apprehended as a mode of classifying, ordering, creating, and destroying people, labor power, land, environment, and capital.
Race precedes scientific racism and even class in assembling the 'world market'.
Analyses of colonialism, fascism, liberalism, and neoliberalism are partial without understanding the racial ordering system.

Origin of the Word "Race"

The word 'race' originally referred to types of plants or animals.
In the Iberian context, 'raza' was ambiguated from a medieval Castilian term denoting a 'defect'.
Christians possessed limpieza de sangre or 'clean blood,' while raza referred to the negative stain marking the blood of Jews, Moors, and 'heathens'.
Race shifted in meaning across centuries of colonialism, scientific racism, and the dismantling of such systems, relating to religion, culture, blood, epidermis, and gene.

Race and European Constructions

Race has been vital to European constructions of the proper political and economic subject in relation to colonial endeavors.
Sylvia Wynter traces the secularization of the European figure of 'Man' in relation to race from homo politicus to homo oeconomicus, ethnoclassed as a wealthy Western approximation.
Race as hierarchized difference was invented for and globalized through European colonial domination.
Race has firmly defined the 'extrahuman,' excluded from norms of ethical treatment.
Today, homo oeconomicus is represented as the human itself, and the material struggle is between Man and those defined as outside of Man as the proper economic subject.

Colonial Histories and the Present

Race has the same materiality as class in constituting the hierarchies of the 'social'.
Race and class are historically conjoined, prompting consideration of neoliberalism as a raced market.

Three Scholarly Foci on Race and Neoliberalism

The first addresses how neoliberal ideologies and policies have sought to erase power's imbrication in public spaces while personalizing agency into individual rationalism evidenced by 'choice' making.
- Neoliberalism has been complicit in creating 'color-blindness,' reducing race to individual prejudice while obscuring structural racialized inequalities, explained by behavioral deficits drawing on racist stereotypes.
The second examines shifting migration and population patterns within neoliberal states and across the global neoliberal economy.
- Migration flows reproduce old colonial routes and carve out new routes due to capital accumulation and labor demands.
- The Global War on Terror has propelled exodus from the Middle East, Afghanistan, the Sahel, and North-East Africa.
- The 'refugee crisis' has been used to politicize migration as a threat to social stability.
- 'Multiculturalism' has been co-opted by neoliberal states to discipline and manage population groups along racialized lines, depressing labor conditions.
- Neoliberalism articulates immigration strategies of community cohesion with neo-imperial strategies of national exclusion.
The third explores recent ideological reactions to neoliberalism on the part of the racial majorities of the Global North.
- Neoliberal policies destroyed racialized compacts that mediated struggles between state, labor, and business, structurally positioning a 'white working class' in more secure jobs.
- The nineteenth-century notion of the 'residuum' has been resurrected to capture resentment felt by those believing themselves displaced by newcomers.
- Ideologues point to a positive record of anti-discrimination legislation in contrast to deepening inequalities among 'indigenous' working classes.
- Some critical political economists posit 'race' as identity politics against 'class' as structural inequality.
- Other scholars draw attention to historical racism imputed into pre-neoliberal welfare systems.

Overview of Raced Markets Contributions

The contributors address the three foci and introduce new questions concerning race and political economy.
Matthew Watson’s article on Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics Textbooks considers the import and translation of the white, colonizing Crusoe character into the central homo oeconomicus figure of standard economics textbooks.
- Watson traces how a colonial novelist’s imperial fantasy centered on the exploitative, hierarchical relation between Crusoe and Friday came to be de-raced and abstracted from its original racialized and extractive power relation within the pedagogical device of the textbook Crusoe economy.
- The article sheds light on how the early marginalists came to be so captivated by the Crusoe figure. For these economists, Crusoe’s desert island setting, seemingly without metropole or hinterland, was convenient for the way early marginalist theory committed to understanding economic relations in isolation from a wider imperial setting, whereas the commodified figure of Friday, on whose labour Crusoe’s accumulation is dependent, was decidedly inconvenient.
- Within marginalist thought, Watson details, constrained maximization problems became understood to be solved by individuals removed from social relations of power; solo characters engaged in a straightforward ‘game against nature’.
- Out of this mode of thought, the model of market exchange remains to this day based implicitly on a fictitious coloniser, imagined to be socially islanded as well as geographically marooned, with the racialised and commodified enslaved human on which his accumulation is dependent entirely disavowed.
Ros Williams and Sibille Merz address the complexities of ‘race’ and ‘science’ as they meet in the present context of the raced markets of genes and cells in an article entitled ‘We all have a responsibility to each other’: valuing racialised bodies in the neoliberal bioeconomy.
- Williams and Merz appeal for a shift to the level of genes and cells to demonstrate how ‘race’ has returned as ‘science’ in bioscientific economies, despite decades passing since ‘race’ was proven not to correspond to any real biological correlate.
- Clinical trials for pharmaceuticals in the US are compared with stem cell transplantation in the UK to reveal how racial taxonomies have returned in the economic ordering of genetic matter in scientific markets.
In their article, Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Liberal Welfare State, Bhambra and Holmwood set up their analysis against standard accounts of the welfare politics of the present in which a contemporary ‘failure of solidarity’ in the context of a perceived increase in immigration is understood to have diminished the social pact necessary for a welfare state to properly function.
- Bhambra and Holmwood build what they refer to as a ‘deeper historical sociology of coloniality’ which accounts for the formative events and contexts which still inform the character of welfare today.
- The authors focus in particular on the claim that non-market welfare provision represents the decommodification of claims to income beyond standard claims derived from capital or labour. Instead, Bhambra and Holmwood argue, commodification is already racialised, as the long centuries of enslavement are testament to.
In his article entitled Racism and Far-Right Imaginaries within Neoliberal Political Economy, Richard Saull examines the complex racialised effects of neoliberalism prior to, within and beyond the contexts of Brexit and Trump.
- Saull’s paper draws attention to forms of racialisation produced within neoliberal contexts.
- The neoliberal racialisation of welfare and incarceration, for example, is identifiable alongside the white anxiety generated in relation to the constant production of insecurities under a neoliberal system, selectively figured by the far-right as those socioeconomically ‘left behind’ as economic justification for their political project.
In her article Detroit’s Municipal Bankruptcy: Racialized Geographies of Austerity, Sarah Phinney makes a compelling argument for understanding the subprime crisis and subsequent municipal bankruptcy in Detroit as raced events.
- Phinney demonstrates how expenditure cuts and restructuring at the urban scale have been enacted at the expense of the racialised urban poor.
- The article makes a substantial contribution to the first body of literature we identify on the neoliberal obfuscation of race.
Finally, in the article Refugees as Surplus Population: race, migration and capitalist value regimes, Prem Kumar Rajaram makes a case for understanding refugees and migrants collectively as surplus populations, in the Marxian sense, within regimes of value.
- Rajaram makes a clear intervention in the second body of work on race and neoliberalism outlined above, that which takes migration as its central focus.

Conclusion

The collection of articles geographically gravitates towards North America and Europe, acknowledging the need to go beyond this provincialism.
Intersectional analyses of gender and sexuality could be further integrated.
The special issue speaks instructively to the analysis of current global politics, arguing that race has been and remains integral not just to the raced markets of capitalism but to neoliberalism more specifically.
The current conjuncture cannot be defined by an exceptional intrusion of racism, nor can its racism be dismissed as epiphenomenal.
Examining how race functions in structural and agential ways is crucial for understanding the twists and turns of global neoliberalism.

Here are the main theories and concepts discussed in the provided text:

Raced Markets: The central concept, referring to how race has become material in the global political economy, influencing markets and social conditions.
Neoliberalism: Examined through a raced market lens, focusing on both material and discursive understandings.
Colonialism: The historical context in which race was invented and globalized through European domination.
Homo Oeconomicus: The secularized European figure of 'Man' represented as the human itself, influencing norms of ethical treatment.
Color-blindness: The idea that neoliberalism has been complicit in creating 'color-blindness,' reducing race to individual prejudice while obscuring structural racialized inequalities.
Surplus Populations: The concept of understanding refugees and migrants collectively as surplus populations within regimes of value.
Limpieza de sangre: Meaning 'clean blood,' this medieval Castilian term signifies the racial and religious purity ascribed to Christians in contrast to Jews, Moors, and 'heathens.'