Theorizing racial capitalism: Critique, contingency & context

The literature on « racial capitalism » has grown in recent years. But the veracity of the discourse has yet to be matched by theoretical systematicity, acuity or coherence. This contributes to criticisms of the racial capitalism concept. This essay reviews these criticisms and offers a synthetic theory of racial capitalism that can absorb them. The essay shows that the existing critiques fail to see the diversity in the literature on racial capitalism and narrowly focus upon one version of racial capitalism theory: the « universalistic » version that proposes that the articulation of racialization and capital accumulation is a logical necessity. The essay argues that a contingency-context theory of racial capitalism escapes the critiques and sketches the theory. The theory specifies racial capitalism as a sociohistorical formation wherein racial meanings serve to make sense of, structure and legitimate three moments in the circuit of capital: production, the market and finance. Race thus serves as a contingent construction by which capitalism’s inequalities are structured and legitimated. A full-text version of the article in English is available at https://marronnages.org