Racial anticapitalism during the Great Depression

This article is about a critique of capitalism I call the politics of racial despair, which sought to resurrect a racially defined culture against the impersonal domination of capital. This argument helps us understand an underlying logic behind racist critiques of markets, and I show how the politics of racial despair appealed to white racial identity to reenchant capitalism's decontextualized social relations. I discuss an example of the politics of racial despair forged in the Depression-era American South: the political theory of Donald Davidson, a member of the Southern Agrarians. Drawing on archival material, I show how the Southern Agrarians were part of a transnational politics of racial despair that sought to counter impersonal domination with a return to allegedly concrete forms of life—subsistence production and mythologies of race. Today, we see the stirrings of this racialized critique of capitalism. Davidson's political thought serves as a reminder that not all critiques of capitalism stem from a concern with equality or freedom, but can also serve malign ends.