Raced Markets: An Introduction Notes
Raced Markets: An Introduction
Lisa Tilley and Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University of London
Argues that race, initially a European fiction for colonization, has become a material reality through raced markets in the global political economy.
The rise of fascistic movements is linked to race functioning structurally and agentically in reproducing raced markets.
Neoliberalism is the current political-economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame.
This special issue attends to race as productive and material, not just ideological.
Key words: Race; neoliberalism; political economy; raced markets; Trump; Brexit; Grenfell
Fanon Quote
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The 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
June 2017: Fire in Grenfell Tower, a social-housing high-rise in North Kensington, West London.
71 victims, mainly Black and minority ethnic members of London’s impoverished population.
Linked to neoliberal urbanism: lack of regulation, outsourcing renovations, gentrification, and the diminution of social housing stock.
Demonstrates racialization of UK housing policy: Black and minority ethnic residents are more likely to live in poor-quality housing.
This is representative of a global reality where racialized 'Others of Europe' are impoverished and marginalized in cities worldwide.
Brexit
The 'leave' campaign was structured around racial imaginaries of reclaimed sovereignty.
Defining moments included the murder of anti-racism campaigner Jo Cox by a white supremacist and a UKIP poster featuring Syrian asylum seekers with the text ‘Breaking Point'.
Anti-immigration sentiment intensified, leading to racist and xenophobic abuse.
Theresa May and the 'Ordinary Working Class'
Despite implementing neoliberalism, Theresa May claimed it wasn't working for all citizens.
Shifted discourse towards serving the ‘ordinary working class’.
Conventional wisdom: the ‘white working class’ ‘left behind’ by neoliberalism should be the central political focus 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.
Surprise electoral college win emboldened far-right elements and led to racist violence.
Hillary Clinton’s loss attributed to retaliation against neoliberalism and its failure to distribute resources to the ‘white working class’ of rust-belt America.
Race and class returned to the central focus, with the ‘white working class’ deployed as the economic rationale for populist political projects.
Race and Neoliberalism in Political Economy
The current crises of neoliberalism require serious engagement with race.
Political economy often overlooks race, despite extensive critical work on gender and class.
There is a wealth of literature by racialized and colonized intellectuals and engagements with the political economy of race in other fields.
Neoliberalism has been thoroughly examined by critical political economists.
Genealogies of Neoliberalism
Materialist readings trace neoliberalism to the 1970s and 1980s against corporate liberalism.
Corporate liberalism involved capital’s compromise with organized labor and a redistributive welfare state.
Neoliberalism began as an abstract doctrine emphasizing free markets and secured property rights.
The first experiments were in Pinochet’s Chile under violent force by the ‘Chicago boys’ (economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman).
Chile became a laboratory for reorganizing the relationship among capital, labor, and the state.
In the North Atlantic, figures like Volcker, Thatcher, and Reagan replicated elements of this experiment through liberalization, financialization, and deregulation.
The state became the securer of property rights and market maker, with limited intervention in markets.
Post-Structural Understandings of Neoliberalism
Scholars have been informed by post-structural understandings, particularly Wendy Brown.
Neoliberalism is a mode of reason where all actions are understood as market conduct, and political domains are marketplaces.
The neoliberal economization of conduct makes measurable any aspect of life reinterpreted through metrics and quantified in economic terms.
Brown critiques the anti-democratic nature of this economization.
Even retracting neoliberal policies wouldn't end the neoliberal reason.
Neoliberalism is seen as fundamentally in contradiction with liberal democracy and was birthed as a reaction to fascism.
William Davies and the 'Revenge of Politics on Economics'
Davies sees Trump and Brexit as popular movements against the economic common sense of neoliberalism.
These movements defy economic rationality and experts.
This special issue asks us to confront this understanding on a deeper level of analysis.
Absence of 'Race' in Neoliberalism Analysis
Scholarly understandings of neoliberalism, whether emerging from liberal democracy or eroding it, commonly lack analytical importance to ‘race’.
This reticence arises from the legacies of scientific racism: claiming a ‘materiality’ on behalf of race risks falling into a eugenicist position.
Stuart Hall and the Ideological Dimension of Race
Stuart Hall consigned race to the ideological dimension of capitalist crisis, entrenching a divide between class as materiality and race as ideology.
Race cannot be reduced to an ideology of racism and should be apprehended as a mode of classifying, ordering, creating, and destroying people, labour power, land, environment and capital.
Race precedes scientific racism and even precedes class in assembling the ‘world market’.
Understanding the racial ordering system is crucial for analyzing colonialism, fascism, liberalism, neoliberalism, and the present moment of fascist resurgence.
The Evolution of the Word 'Race'
Originally referred to types of plants or animals.
In the Iberian context, ‘raza’ was ambiguated with a ‘defect’.
Christians possessed limpieza de sangre or ‘clean blood’, and raza referred to the negative stain marking the blood of Jews, Moors, and ‘heathens’.
Gradually shifted in meaning across centuries of colonialism, scientific racism, and the dismantling of such systems.
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 secularisation of the European figure of ‘Man’ in relation to race through homo politicus to homo oeconomicus, who is ‘ethnoclassed’ as a wealthy Western approximation.
Race as hierarchised difference was invented for and globalized through European colonial domination.
Race has defined the ‘extrahuman’, excluded from norms of ethical treatment.
The homo oeconomicus is represented as the human, and the material struggle is between Man and those defined as outside of Man.
Race has been integral to centuries of colonization in the service of dispossession, extraction, and enslavement, and continues to play a role in the ordering of accumulation and impoverishment.
Three Scholarly Foci on Race and Neoliberalism
Race as Material
Race has the same kind of materiality as class in constituting the hierarchies and eviscerations of the ‘social’.
Race and class are historically conjoined.
Neoliberalism as a raced market.
Co-Constitutive Relationship
Enquires into the co-constitutive relationship among race, racism, and neoliberalism.
Erasing Imbrication of Power
Neoliberal ideologies and policies have sought to erase the imbrication of power in the production and regulation of public spaces while personalizing agency.
Complicit in the creation of ‘colour-blindness’.
Race has been reduced to individual prejudice, with structural racialized inequalities explained by behavioral deficits.
Neoliberalism has radically increased the obfuscation of race from the economy.
Shifting Migration
Examines shifting migration and population patterns within neoliberal states and across the global neoliberal economy.
Migration flows have reproduced old colonial routes and carved out new routes.
Destabilizations from the Global War on Terror have 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 racialised lines, depressing labour conditions.
Neoliberalism articulates immigration strategies of community cohesion with neo-imperial strategies of national exclusion.
Ideological Reactions
Explores recent ideological reactions to neoliberalism on the part of the racial majorities of the Global North.
Neoliberal policies were heavily implicated in the destruction of racialised compacts, 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 ‘left behind’.
Ideologues have pointed to a positive record of anti-discrimination legislation in contrast to deepening inequalities amongst ‘indigenous’ working classes.
Some critical political economists have posited ‘race’ as identity politics in opposition to ‘class’ as structural inequality.
Other scholars have drawn attention to the historical racism imputed into pre-neoliberal welfare systems.
A critical evaluation of the moral weight and analytical purchase of the ‘white working class’ as a constituency is extremely salient.
Overview of Raced Markets Contributions
Matthew Watson
Considers the import and translation of the white, colonizing Crusoe character into the central homo oeconomicus figure of standard economics textbooks.
Traces how a colonial novelist’s imperial fantasy centered on the exploitative, hierarchical relation between Crusoe and Friday came to be de-raced.
The early marginalists were captivated by the Crusoe figure because his desert island setting was convenient for understanding economic relations in isolation from a wider imperial setting.
Constrained maximization problems became understood to be solved by individuals removed from social relations of power.
The model of market exchange remains based on a fictitious coloniser, disavowing the racialized and commodified enslaved human.
Watson cautions us to look again at the raced market frame of today’s economic thought and to dismantle the theory of market exchange.
Ros Williams and Sibille Merz
Address the complexities of ‘race’ and ‘science’ in the context of the raced markets of genes and cells.
Despite ‘race’ not corresponding to any real biological correlate, they appeal for us to shift analytical scale down to the level of genes and cells to demonstrate how ‘race’ has returned as ‘science’ in bioscientific economies.
They compare clinical trials for pharmaceuticals in the US with stem cell transplantation in the UK to reveal how racial taxonomies have returned in the economic ordering of genetic matter in scientific markets.
Within these neoliberal biomarkets, the ethical appeal to a raced community, understood as morally indebted to one another, has become central to raced biomarkets which produce value out of difference.
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.
In contrast, they argue that such a failure of solidarity is written into the logic of the welfare state on account of its colonial origins which structured systems of racialised and hierarchical ordering.
They build a ‘deeper historical sociology of coloniality’ which accounts for the formative events and contexts that still inform the character of welfare today.
They claim that commodification is already racialised, as the long centuries of enslavement are testament to.
Labour power sold as a commodity should be understood as already partially decommodified away from the form in which the enslaved labourer herself is the commodity.
Richard Saull
Examines the complex racialised effects of neoliberalism prior to, within and beyond the contexts of Brexit and Trump.
Draws attention to forms of racialisation produced within neoliberal contexts.
Neoliberal racialisation of welfare and incarceration is identifiable alongside white anxiety generated under neoliberalism, selectively figured by the far-right as those ‘left behind’.
Racism is central to neoliberal political economy, not only in the reproduction of exclusions produced by colonialism and liberalism but also in the ways racist politics become pronounced in moments of structural crisis.
Sarah Phinney
Makes a compelling argument for understanding the subprime crisis and subsequent municipal bankruptcy in Detroit as raced events.
Correcting the de-raced understandings of austerity urbanism by critical urban geographers, Phinney demonstrates how expenditure cuts and restructuring at the urban scale have been enacted at the expense of the racialised urban poor.
Race is implicated in urban austerity on at least three levels: causes of the crisis, blame apportioned, and effects of municipal bankruptcy.
The credit-redlining and subsequent super-inclusion into credit markets of spatially divided racial communities cannot be overlooked.
Detroit's bankruptcy was discursively attached to city pensioners and the racialised poor through the ‘delinquent taxpayer’ narrative.
The racialised urban poor were disproportionate victims of subsequent water shut-offs in the city.
Prem Kumar Rajaram
Makes a case for understanding refugees and migrants collectively as surplus populations, in the Marxian sense, within regimes of value.
Despite the exclusion of migrants, understanding racialised populations as simply excluded from the nation-state disavows their condition as necessarily included as a source of informal and undervalued labour.
There are many routes of inclusion for informal labour into European economies, which reinforces exclusion from more dignified tiers within a racially hierarchised labour regime.
Rajaram considers how migrants and refugees become subject to discourses of exclusion while being incorporated into informal labour markets.
He intervenes in the body of work on race and neoliberalism that takes migration as its central focus, from the perspective of Eastern Europe.
Limitations
The collection gravitates towards North America and Europe.
A consolidated research project on raced markets would have to go beyond this provincialism.
The collection engages with race in relation to class but has not integrated analyses of gender and sexuality to the same extent.
Conclusion
This special issue speaks instructively to the analysis of current global politics.
It departs from the positions that racism is an exceptional intrusion or a distraction to the workings of neoliberalism.
Race has been and remains integral to the raced markets of capitalism and to neoliberalism more specifically.
The current conjuncture cannot be defined by an exceptional intrusion of racism, nor can its racism be dismissed as epiphenomenal.
To adequately account for the twists and turns of global neoliberalism, we must examine how race functions in structural and agential ways.