Racial Capitalism

Michael Ralph
New York University

Maya Singhal
Harvard University
PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHORS
“A little over a year ago I was in bondage. And, now I’m back out here reaping the blessings and
getting the benefits that go along with…everything that’s out here for kings like us. The reason
why we like this—this jewelry and these diamonds and stuff…It’s because we really from
Africa—and that’s where all this stuff comes from. And, we originated from kings…So don’t
look down on the youngsters because they want to have shiny things. It’s in our genes. We just
don’t all know our history.”
-Pimp C, in his last interview before dying in 2007

“What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A
Negro is a Negro. He becomes a slave only in certain relationships.”
-Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital (1849)

“When I was sixteen I was very fond of dancing, and was invited privately to a negro shindy or
dance, about twelve miles from home, and for this purpose I got Aunt Dinah to starch the collars
for my two linen shirts, which were the first standing collars I had ever worn in my life.
I had a good pair of trousers, and a jacket, but no necktie, nor no pocket handkerchief, so
I stole aunt Dinah's checked apron, and tore it in two—one part for a necktie, the other for a
pocket handkerchief. I had twenty-four cents, or pennies which I divided equally with fifty large
brass buttons in my right and left pockets. Now, thought I to myself, when I get on the floor and
begin to dance—oh! how the niggers will stare to hear the money jingle. I was combing my hair
to get the knots out of it: I then went and looked in an old piece of broken looking-glass, and I
thought, without joking, that I was the best-looking negro that I had ever seen in my life.”
-Narrative of the Life J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky
—containing an Account of His Three Escapes, 1839, 1846, and 1848

On December 14, 1850 the Anglo-Norman left New Orleans on a “celebratory maiden voyage”
(Johnson 2013, 1). Just as the passengers started enjoying themselves, a riotous stream “of hot
water accompanied with steam was forced out of the main pipe,” according to H.A. Kidd, editor
of the New Orleans Crescent, who knew the event most intimately. Drenched in “a considerable
shower,” Kidd had just started to compose himself when he was “lifted high in the air…
enveloped,” by the sudden ejaculation: “when I arose to the surface I wiped the water from my
face, and attempted to obtain a view of things around me” (Kidd qtd. in Lloyd 1856). Depending
on how high Kidd was thrown in the air, he might have seen: slaves working in Virginia coal
mines, others extracting fibers from hemp in Kentucky, and still more working as carpenters in
Alabama and sailing in North Carolina. He might have even seen one rolling a cigar in South
Carolina.1
Kidd might have even seen enslaved people being beaten with impunity in the
Mississippi River Valley, generating unheralded profits for greedy merchants of capital. This
would be the sharpest contrast with his immediate predicament. Kidd’s unreliable steamboat
would have included enslaved people who were master chefs, some working as waiters, and
others manning the engine that had just exploded. These highly skilled workers were usually
insured before their owners rented them to steamboat companies so they could recover the value
of their assets in the aftermath of tragic incidents like this one. So the practice of destroying,
discarding, and quickly replacing slaves was a different approach to labor and capital than the
reality of the enslaved people Kidd had encountered just before his life hung in the balance.

1
 In discussing the volatility that defined antebellum capital accumulation, Walter Johnson
(2013, 113) notes the “accounting of losses” that transpired in the “aftermath of every steamboat
explosion”—an archival practice concerning the lives of enslaved people that paradoxically
banished some free people to “silences” in the archive (Hartman 1997, Trouillot 1995)2:
The nameless dead were noted but not counted in the rolls of the disasters. Unlike
cabin passengers, those who traveled on the decks of the steamboats bought
tickets without reservations, their identities going unrecorded. Unlike enslaved
people, those who were “free” had no monetary value; their deaths occasioned no
legal action and left no courtroom biography of their short-cut lives. (Johnson
2013, 114) 3
Johnson refers to the calculus involved with placing monetary value on the lives of enslaved
Africans variously as “slave racial capitalism” (14), “slave-racial capitalism” (282), “racial-
capitalism” (84), and “racial capitalism” (143; 147),4 though his analysis begs even more precise
language to differentiate between the free people who bought tickets aboard the steamboat and
were thus recorded in the ship manifest and those whose names have been lost to history.5
“Racial capitalism” has surfaced during the past few decades as a way to grapple with the
role of violence in the production of capital. Scholars working in this tradition draw their
inspiration—and usually their framework—from Cedric Robinson’s influential 1983 text, Black
Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Scholars use “racial capitalism” to explain
how racialism merged with capitalism (Bennett 2018; Bhattacharyya 2018; Hudson 2017; Kelley
2017; Robinson 1983) and to highlight coercion and productivity in capital investment and forms
of exchange (Baptist 20136; Hartman 2016;7 Johnson 2013; Kelley 2015 [1990]; Morgan 2018;
Robinson 1983; Singh 2017; Taylor 2018; Haley 2018).
Other scholars follow Robinson in arguing that Karl Marx treated slavery as a mode of
accumulation prior to capitalism; consequently, they re-conceive what he termed “so-called
primitive [or original] accumulation” as “racial capitalism” to stress the integral role that
“expropriation” (a form of violent dispossession) plays in shaping economic growth in capitalist
systems (Byrd et al. 2018; Melamed 2015; Singh 20178). Some scholars use “racial capitalism”
to insist that capitalism is always inherently racialized (Gilmore, 2017; Melamed 2015).9 Others
take the argument further, letting race stand in for all the conceivable forms of difference
capitalism might use to exploit people (Lowe 2015), though this latter approach does not explain
why race should be the form of difference that stands in for all forms of marginalization.
Leong (2012) uses “racial capitalism” to explain how racial identity becomes the basis
for capitalist exploitation. While some scholars are specifically concerned with the role of
slavery in relation to capitalism (Baptist 2013; Johnson 2013; Keeling 2019)10 and others use
“racial capitalism” to explain moments when capitalism deploys strategies for extraction or
accumulation based on racial hierarchies (Bhattacharyya 2018; Jenkins n.d.11; Johnson and Lubin
2017; Leong 2012; Wang 2018).12
In what follows, we would like to highlight some limits of “racial capitalism” as a
theoretical project. First, the “racial capitalism” literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by
“race” or “capitalism.” Second, some scholars who identify their project as “racial capitalism”
treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave
trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity extends beyond scholarship expressly concerned
with racial capitalism and, in some iterations, treats slavery as a synonym for abject status,13
devoid of historical explanation or institutional analysis.14 Where racial capitalism is concerned,
most of the scholarship focuses on the Mississippi Valley during the height of cotton production

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but tends to overlook how enslaved people cultivated expertise with implications for how we
think about race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability (Ralph 2018).
Scholarship on “racial capitalism” has usefully highlighted the important relationship
between coercion and productivity in capital accumulation (Baptist 2014; Bhattacharyya 2018;
Johnson 2014). Yet, in focusing on the extraordinary violence that shaped productivity during
the antebellum age, racial capitalism scholarship generally ignores the fact that—during that
same period—enslaved people were offered incentives and unprecedented mobility in the
nation’s riskiest and most lucrative emergent industries as a way to derive revenue from their
extraordinary skills.15
But, since “racial capitalism” scholarship tends to adopt the conceptual framework laid
out by Robinson, it is worth discussing his influential intervention at some length.

The Construction of the Study

“I have hoped to contribute to the correction of these errors by challenging in both instances the
displacement of history by aeriform theory and self-serving legend. Whether I have succeeded is
for the reader to judge. But first it may prove useful to outline the construction of the study.”
-Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (1983, 1)

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) offers a powerful way to understand race and capital in
that its effort to make sense of the economic and political relationships that established the
infrastructure for global trade and diplomacy begins in the social and economic transformations
of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. This approach prepares Robinson to explain how
strategies for gaining or inhibiting access to capital in what was eventually called Europe became
the basis for forms of racial difference in the age of the Transatlantic slave trade and beyond.
Robinson stresses that political organization structured access to capital long before the age of
nation-states, hence his insightful discussion of the way that Italian city-states financed
excursions before formal systems of lending and credit were created in the North Atlantic.
Perhaps most powerfully, Black Marxism insists that peoples who would ultimately be
kidnapped, coerced, and trapped in exploitative labor regimes have developed their own forms of
critique and their own social movements to identify and attack injustices. More specifically,
Robinson argues persuasively that people of Africa and African diasporas have always nurtured
their own concerns, projects, and priorities when it comes to the question of capital—that they
have developed compelling ways to theorize and engage in economic and political
transformation that are not merely derivative. Cedric Robinson distills this critical approach as
the “Black Radical Tradition”; “racial capitalism” is his term for the complicated predicament
they sought to navigate. “Capital and racism” for Robinson (1983, xiii) “did not break from the
old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism”
dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”
[…]
Robinson—like those who draw heavily upon his work—contends that Marx discussed
slavery in passing, if at all. He argues that plantation economies were either irrelevant or
incidental to Marx’s “critique of capitalism.”16 If race is central to “capitalism” and Marx’s
account of race is wholly inadequate, it follows that scholars of “racial capitalism” would
remedy these perceived deficits.
[…]

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 For Robinson, Marxism was a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided,17 Eurocentric
take on economy that scholars in the Black Radical Tradition were eventually wise enough to
shake off.18 “In the studies of these [diverse liberation] struggles, and often through engagement
with them,” Robinson (1983, xxxi) explains, “the Black Radical Tradition began to emerge and
overtake Marxism in the work of these Black radicals. W. E. B. Du Bois, in the midst of the
antilynching movement, C. L. R. James, in the vortex of anticolonialism, and Richard Wright,
the sharecropper's son, all brought forth aspects of the militant tradition which had informed
successive generations of Black freedom fighters.” But the “freedom fighters” Robinson
invokes—and those with whom they were in conversation—developed novel theories of capital
without following any thinker’s orthodoxy, whether in the form of original research concerning
crime statistics, ballistics, and forensics (Ida B. Wells), sovereignty (Walter Rodney), sport,
literature, and film (C.L.R. James) or political belonging (Claudia Jones).
[…]
Robinson’s scholarship is an exercise in canon formation. In part due to the force of
Robinson’s argument and his influence on a generation of scholars, the architects of his “Black
Radical Tradition”—W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, C.L.R. James—have been successfully
incorporated into mainstream academic scholarship. Part of what the term “racial capitalism”
does is to group together the scholars—primarily scholars of color—who have theorized capital.
But Robinson’s stance on the question of capital is premised on a series of elisions that diminish
the analytic insights of this project.19 For example, W.E.B. Du Bois is often cited as providing
the framework for “racial capitalism,” though he never used the phrase and was not nearly as
concerned with “capitalism” as a concept as the scholars who take up his work.20
[…]
Thus, a compelling question for scholars interested in what Robinson calls “racial
capitalism” is whether his point of departure—a misguided reading of Marx coupled with a
masculinist theoretical tradition that draws upon an essentialist rendition of African culture—
provides enough nuance to theorize capital accumulation for those of us interested in diverse
genres of social difference. The world Robinson describes is not merely a “race-based structure”
but a structure that produces and inscribes strict forms of discipline based on gender, sexuality,
race, national origin, ability, character, and intelligence. “[I]n its most militant manifestation,”
what Robinsons conceives as the “Black Radical Tradition” was concerned with the “overthrow”
of that “whole” structure.
[…]
To remedy this oversight, some of the most sophisticated theorists of “racial capitalism”
have adapted the term. In noting that “domestic labor sustained the plantation household,” Sarah
Haley (2018, 10-11) writes of “gendered racial capitalism” as she teases out how gender and
social standing shaped social mobility in the years leading up to Emancipation (following
Glymph 2013) […] Tracing a through line between the age of Jim Crow and what Michelle
Alexander has famously dubbed “The New Jim Crow,” Haley (2018, 10-11) notes that the
“ongoing project of abolition is reflected in efforts to dismantle prisons.” And, in defining
“abolition” as a “theory and practice through which to” theorize “the prison regime (including its
manifestations in surveillance, detention, monitoring” and “policing,” Haley pushes beyond
“racial capitalism” to the “forensics of capital” (Pietz 2001; Ralph 2015).
In tracing legal protocols for redress based on the “monetary value of a human life,”
William Pietz refers to the “forensics of capital.” Pietz draws our attention to the question of who
owes what to whom (Ralph 2015) based on forms of inquiry—forensic investigations—that

4
establish liability, or responsibility for injury. We might extend this insight to explore forms of
profiling and surveillance that establish forensic profiles as well as strategies used to
institutionalize a person’s credit profile, or broker access to capital (Ralph 2015). The forensics
of capital encourages us to consider how, in every society and throughout history, people
establish institutional protocols for determining: how injuries should be adjudicated, as well as
which forms of difference are salient and how they shape access to capital and to political
possibilities. This is not to suggest that the forensic profile that has traction in a given society or
moment captures the truth of how people and polities view themselves. Instead, forensic profiles,
like credit profiles, help to illuminate prevailing institutional arrangements and articulations of
sovereignty—they rely on these forms of scaffolding. This is why the forensic or credit profile of
an oppressed group in a colonial framework differs so dramatically from indigenous cosmologies
concerned with how people see themselves.
[…]
“Race,” in some of the scholarship Robinson inspires, is used to theorize social difference
more broadly, as in Ruthie Gilmore’s handy gloss: “group differentiated vulnerability to
premature death.” The downside is that sometimes people might focus on race to the exclusion of
other forms of difference, diminishing the prospects of a more nuanced approach. For, Robinson
(1983, 2) did not merely see “Racism” as “a convention for ordering the relations of European to
non-European peoples.” He is ultimately interested in the way that political belonging is
inscribed in formal bureaucratic categories and practices, “[a]s part of the inventory of Western
civilization[, racism] would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to
the present.” Thus Robinson is primarily interested in the way African Americans—in fashioning
a forensics of capital—came to theorize their predicament and establish a formidable response
steeped in mutual aid (Robinson 1983, xxxi). […] In highlighting “collective forms” of
rebellion—most notably, “marronage”—Cedric Robinson treats African people who escaped
from enslavement to build their own settlements as his template for political and economic
autonomy. From Robinson’s perspective, maroons grew weary of accommodating slavery. He
defines their project as an attempt to restore African social institutions and traditions.21
Our interest in the forensics of capital draws upon how Maroons combined African and
Afrodiasporic practices and institutions familiar to them (Hurston 1931) with diverse resources
in the world they inhabited to pioneer institutions in partnership with indigenous people living in
the swamps and hinterlands of the Americas from whom they acquired crucial insights. We see
this as an opportunity to push beyond what Robinson calls “the cultural corruption of the race”22
to critique the role that patriarchy has played in political aspirations. […] The task to “exhume
open rebellion from the case file” provokes us to consider practices of accounting that structure
access to capital and regiment notions of accountability. It is for this reason, some scholars of
“racial capitalism” have combined it with theories of prediction, surveillance, and accounting—
with the academic discourse on “late capitalism.”23

Late Capitalism

Jackie Wang is persuasive in her “attempt to update the analytic of racial capitalism for a
contemporary context” by theorizing social difference in relation to “predatory lending” and
“parasitic governance” (Wang 2018, 69). Wang explores bad-faith credit practices, what she
calls “financial states of exception,” governmental automation, and different methods of looting
and confinement as aspects of both “racial capitalism” as it intersects with “late capitalism.”

5
 Wang most often uses “late capitalism” when discussing credit, drawing on the “two
sides of capitalism” illuminated by the work of David Harvey and Rosa Luxemburg,
respectively: one sphere governed by law, the other by violence. Wang ties the latter sphere to
the “international credit system,” what Harvey terms “the linchpin of late capitalism” (Wang
2018, 113). […] Wang explores how these processes are specifically racialized. […] In
highlighting the pivotal role of risk in capital accumulation, Wang encourages us to consider the
crucial role it played in the debut of what we now consider to be marine insurance—strategies
for establishing security and seeking compensation for cargo and lives subject to the “perils of
the seas.” Some of the most illuminating historical inquiries concerning capital treat the fifteenth
century as a watershed moment for violent dispossession and the construction of plantation
economies throughout the Americas, and for new systems of labor organization, productivity,
measurement, and accounting (Beckert 2014, James 1938, Mintz 1985, Trouillot 1995). The
earliest known record for a life insurance policy dates to the fifteenth century (Ralph 2018),
which suggests a productive intersection concerning forms of risk and liability pioneered in that
moment and broader trajectories of capital accumulation linked to the dawn of plantation
economies in the Americas and the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples. For this reason,
we see the forensics of capital as a way to combine the most promising insights of racial
capitalism and late capitalism while fostering careful attention to forms of prediction,
calculation, profiling and militarism that have defined capital accumulation since at least the
fifteenth century.
Beckert refers to the 15th century articulation of coercion, dispossession, and
industry as “war capitalism” (Beckert 2014). He also notes that “war capitalism”
resurfaces at crucial moments of capital accumulation and exchange in the centuries to
follow. Drawing out this insight, it is worth noting that “late capitalism” is intimately
intertwined with the historicity of war, though that relationship has been latent in the
work of scholars who deploy the term.
The German economist and sociologist, Werner Sombart offers the first documented use
of “late capitalism” in his 1902 Der moderne Kapitalismus (Historisch-systematische
Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart)
(Sombart 1902). Sombart wrote, approvingly, that capitalism would eventually run its course,
setting the stage for a more just society. In the broader arc of his work, Sombart theorized the
intimate relationship between economic decisions and military objectives.24 For seventy years
after Sombart coined “late capitalism,” the term was scarcely used.
The resurgence of interest in “late capitalism” as an analytic concept would have to wait
for the Vietnam War-era. Ernst Mandel popularized “late capitalism” in his 1972 book by the
same name, where he sought to develop a theoretical framework for studying capitalist societies
in the wake of World Wars I and II (or what Mandel calls “the long post war”). But the scholarly
usage of “late capitalism” is most frequently tethered to Frederic Jameson’s 1984 article,
“Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” and the 1991 book by the same
name. […]
Whereas “late capitalism” is used by Sombart to mark capitalism’s inevitable demise, it is
used by Mandel to theorize the “long post war period” that connects World Wars I and II, and by
Jameson’s project to unify progressive forces in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War,
muddying the analytic stakes of this concept. Jameson sees “late capitalism” originating with the
Frankfurt School—particularly with Adorno and Horkheimer—who use it to capture the
“nightmarish” web of state bureaucracy (“state capitalism”) that defined the first half of the

6
twentieth century. But Jameson’s “late capitalism” of the 1980s and ‘90s does not read this
bureaucratic expansion as troubling; instead, it takes bloated government bureaucracy as a fact of
life and uses it to highlight the awesome power of corporations in the age of globalization.25 This
was also a moment when Reaganomics helped usher in coercive strategies for punishment and
profiling that fueled what in hindsight would be dubbed the age of mass incarceration.
[…]
Jameson’s “late capitalism,” meanwhile, does not foreshadow the end of capitalist
domination. He treats “late” as “contemporary”: “late capitalism” marks a period that is distinct
and unique with respect to earlier eras. For Jameson, what was once troubling about capitalism
has been integrated into our “life world” so comprehensively that it is no longer prudent to long
for capitalism’s demise. Yet, Jameson’s argument ironically maps perfectly onto praise for the
end of the Cold War and the consensus of free market fundamentalists that “capitalism”
encapsulates all twenty-first century economic possibilities.26 Many scholars have taken up
Jameson’s notion that “late capitalism” marks a distinct, and especially insidious, iteration of
capitalism, in pursuit of empirical evidence. Some note the rise of the franchise and
financialization as evidence of the globalization that characterizes the dominance of “late
capitalism” (Breu 2011; Mountfort 2016; Taylor 2013). Others read “late capitalism” as referring
to the “postindustrial economy”—the rise of corporations as well as knowledge and service
economies (Banerjee 2010; Clare 2014; Kotiswaran 2011). Still others use “late capitalism” as a
way to describe a world they feel is insufficiently theorized by Marxist critiques of capitalism
(Murray 2008; Smith 2012). Yet, many scholars do not bother to theorize “late capitalism.”27 For
this reason, we believe the forensics of capital presents a more nuanced framework for grappling
with the vexing problem of social difference as well as the protocols used to inscribe and
regiment social categories.

Forensics of Capital

On the eve of the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells
were beefin’. They had agreed to co-author a pamphlet entitled, “Why the Colored American is
not at the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition” to protest the fact that no African Americans
had been appointed to any of the steering committees, nor had any Black artists or intellectuals
been solicited to develop exhibitions. As public criticism gained momentum, Exposition
organizers added a few token African Americans to peripheral committees. They also decided to
host a day when African Americans could visit the fairgrounds, sharing glimpses of African
American life and culture. But, these would be small projects shared for a few hours and not
permanent installations like those which dominated the Midway, and which had been carefully
erected after months of planning and careful design.
[…]
The Chicago-based African American newspaper, Freeman, condemned what it called
“Nigger Day” on the fairgrounds. Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells had initially agreed to
spurn this dubious event, as well. But, as the inaugural day of the Exposition drew closer,
Douglass decided he would speak at the Exposition, after all, believing it was important for his
critical stance to be part of the proceedings for all posterity. Wells, meanwhile, channeled her
energy toward the publication they had been planning to publish and circulate, Why the Colored
American is Not in the World’s Colombian Exposition. And, when it seemed like the money
would not come through, Wells used her networks in the women’s club movement to convene

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African American women of means who pulled together the requisite funding. As such, Wells
successfully managed to inscribe a scholarly critique of the 1893 Exposition and its project to
unite the North and South a generation after slavery through a spectacle focused on the
technological and cultural achievements of the United States, figured as a coherent nation with a
shared sense of purpose.
[…]
The drama of the 1893 Exposition captured the predicament of the Negro. A generation
after the legal end of enslavement, it was a time of fierce debate about the status of progress
toward a free society. It was a debate that likewise surfaced in academic inquiry. In the decades
following Reconstruction, actuarial projections of crime became tethered to race as part of a
national debate about the capacity for self-governance (Ralph 2013). In this moment, policy
experts, social scientists, elected officials, and merchants revised the forensic profile of the
Negro based on this creature’s capacity for self-governance in the modern polity. Consequently,
statistics became a crucial technology for brokering political aspirations.
[…]
Crime statistics helped to inscribe a political hierarchy that accompanied the “economic
and political consolidation of the US nation-state” (Muhammad 2010; Ralph 2013, 182). The
unemployed—newly emancipated African Americans as well as single women, gender non-
conforming peoples, and men ejected from work due to workplace injuries—were treated as
social pariah and subject to diverse forms of policing and incarceration. Many formerly enslaved
African Americans were subject to a forensic calculus that figured them as criminals or as
mentally incompetent (Dilts 2013; Ralph 2013). Observers noted that documented levels of
“crime” and “insanity” were higher for African Americans in Northern cities and argued,
consequently, that legalized enslavement “had held in check a ‘degraded’ moral and intellectual
being who would otherwise prove ruinous to the polity” (Ralph 2013, 182).
As Ida B. Wells demonstrated through careful ballistic analysis and methodological
research into lynching complete with innovative methods in evaluating statistical trends, the
epidemic of lynching—the quintessential hate crime—was in part prompted by a widespread
concern about the massive influx of African American labors into the commercial sphere in the
years following Emancipation; it also marked a panic about failed European efforts to manage
African American desires and decisions about partnership and family. The conflation of race,
sexuality, gender, skill, employment, and privilege that produced lynching—the constellation of
issues that made the 1893 Exposition such a garish spectacle of unabashed white supremacy and
which accounted for the systematic errors in turn of the century actuarial methods—deserves a
method suited to the challenge of theorizing these intersecting dynamics with care and nuance.
[…]
As scholars continue to debate whether capitalism is “racial,” whether it is “late,” and
whether it is coherent enough to be studied in any systematic way, there can be no debate that
social difference shapes differential access to capital and to social mobility. In the august
tradition of critique—whether it takes the form of a published piece, a public address, or
something more dramatic—we are interested to extend the powerful traditions discussed in this
paper in the service of a framework that illuminates the infrastructure of accounting,
surveillance, and exploitation that defines our world while still paying careful attention to what
makes us different from each other and what makes us who we are.

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Notes
1
See Michael Ralph, Treasury of Weary Souls, www.treasuryofwearysouls.com, the most comprehensive ledger of
insured slaves.
2
African Americans are, at times, framed as a people unique in the way they are excised from history (Hartman
1997, Fuentes 201x). This example calls that formulation into question.
3
Ralph (2017) discusses an antebellum explosion at a Virginia coal mine that reveals a similar paradox: the
enslaved people who died were insured and thus more valuable, in monetary terms, than the free white workers who
died (and who did not even have life insurance). Meanwhile, the names of the white workers were printed in
newspapers but not the enslaved workers who were legally property.
4
“[T]he legacy of slave capitalism and capitalist slavery and enduring interactions of race and capital, what
Robinson has termed ‘racial capitalism (Singh 2017, 52).’”
5
Johnson would appear to summon the approach we define as “forensics of capital” (Ralph 2015, as developed from
Pietz 2001) by interrogating “several riverworld commonplaces,” most notably the notion that “poor whites’ lives,
Irish lives, German lives, or simply strangers’ lives were somehow worth less than enslaved lives, because no one
got paid for them” (Johnson 2013, 115).
6
Baptist (2013) does not use the term “racial capitalism” yet his analysis mirrors that of Johnson (2013) and other
scholars who argue for a positive correlation between coercion and productivity in US industry.
7
In referring to “violent structures of slavery, anti-black racism, virulent sexism, and disposability,” Saidiya
Hartman (2016, 171) notes the “forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism.”
8
Singh (2017, 41) worries about a “tendency in Marxist thought to think of slavery as capitalism’s antecedent.”
9
Ruth Gilmore insists that “Capitalism” is “never not racial.” She nonetheless provides a specific genealogy for
“Racial Capitalism”:
Racial capitalism: a mode of production developed in agriculture, improved by enclosure in the
Old World, and captive land and labor in the Americas, perfected in slavery’s time-motion, field
factory choreography, its imperative forged on the anvils of imperial war-making monarchs….
(Gilmore 2017, xx)
For Gilmore, “racial capitalism” would seem to begin in the “Old World” as a byproduct of “capitalism” as she
refers to “racial capitalism’s dramatically scaled cycles of place-making—including all of chattel slavery,
imperialism, settler colonialism, resource extraction, infrastructural coordination, urban industrialization, regional
development, and the financialization of everything” (Gilmore 2017, xx).
10
“In 1819, while considering the role of enslaved women on plantations, Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘It is not their
labor, but their increase which is the first consideration.’” From Jennifer Morgan’s perspective, “Jefferson’s words
articulated a crucial expression of racial capitalism in a time and place that predate the rise of the antebellum
plantation economy on which much of our critical attention to the links between slavery and capitalism attends”
(Morgan 2018, 14; emphasis ours). Singh (2017, 42-43) argues that “Afro-pessimism” effectively precludes “an
understanding of slavery tied to the development of capitalism,” suggesting that these two systems are distinct yet
related.
11
In a 2018 New Dawn podcast interview with Michael Dawson, Destin Jenkins explains how “the built
environment has become a critical site for the intersections of race and capitalism,” so masterfully, it is hard to
imagine why it should not be considered the prevailing framework for thinking about how capital works in urban
contexts rather than a specific intervention concerning the burgeoning sub-field of “racial capitalism” (which
implies it is permissible to study capitalism without attention to race). Jenkins’ discussion of the way that social
difference brokers access to capital—which then shapes access to property, intergenerational wealth, and investment
opportunities—is so illuminating it is worth quoting at length:

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 The thesis is what I call the triple profitability of urban racial capitalism: racial capital derived
from racial segregation…ethnic and racial enclave economies. I focus specifically on San
Francisco, but they are in New York, obviously, when we think about Chinatowns…The second
element is racial capitalism through redevelopment: the compensation of slumlords who have
subdivided Victorians and townhomes and created what I call a kind of sardinification—the
sardining of black people into these once-gorgeous homes… that means of accumulation in terms
of compensating/paying fair market value to the owners of these blighted properties.
But the third piece [is] racial capital through urban renewal debt obligations. Often
times—especially in the field of urban studies/urban history—scholars would talk about “federal
funds.” [It] becomes a kind of catch phrase. [There are] intergovernmental transfer payments from
the federal government to localities, and “federal funds” becomes a slogan…Urban renewal
agencies, what I call municipal debtors—a variety of municipal debtors—issue debt obligations
that were purchased by oftentimes commercial banks, who supplied an initial line of credit—[say,]
$12 million, $15 million. The renewal agency would use that line of credit, really a debt
obligation, and clear entire neighborhoods. And they would promise tax exempt interest income to
the holders of the debt obligation, and we see this for urban renewal but also for public housing
projects that are financed by long-term bonds.
There’s a difference, though, between public housing debt and, say, urban renewal debt.
[Regarding] public housing debt, there are no statutory limitations on the interest rate, whereas for
urban renewal (and of course for debt issued by cities), there is a statutory limit in terms of interest
rates. So, what you are talking about—public housing—becomes an incredible means of capital
accumulation for those investors (fire and casualty insurance companies, wealthy individuals) who
are looking to shield their capital from high federal marginal tax rates in the post-World War II
period…. It’s a way of hedging, it’s a what I like to call, at that point in time, a precursor to
today’s tax off-shore accounts in places like Panama and elsewhere.
12
Angela Davis uses the term when referring to the “racial dimension of capitalism” (Johnson and Lubin, eds. 2017,
248).
13
“Having exposed the brutalities of racial capitalism, Saidiya Hartman and Cedric Robinson also let us know that
there is an error, a miscalculation, in the terror of enjoyment's vicious economy. It's like we have to enjoy all
monsters in order to destroy all monsters” (Moten 2017).
14
See Moten 2018: “But what if we remember not to forget that the black man is not? Any more than the snowman?
Then, in contradistinction to Wagner and the wide acknowledgement he invokes, we might move by way of the
assumption that blackness is older than Africa, older than its diaspora, older than racial slavery, older than its
beginning, older than its name or its submission to the operation of naming. It is the anarchic principle that calls
ordinary nominalization into being and, therefore, into question; it is the subjunctive, substantive, anticipatory
accompaniment of every eviscerative indication. Does racial slavery give blackness its name or does it serve to
solidify and disseminate an ongoing naming? Who is the agent, and what is the context, of that naming? These are
questions concerning the natural history of racial capitalism, as Robinson theorizes, and of antinomian race war, as
Foucault theorizes it. Both theorizations require us to consider the possibility that the history and historicity of
blackness is underived from the generally acknowledged temporal, geography, and psychoeconomic origin Wagner
demarcates wherein (b)lackness begins with an exchange to which one is not a party, in a state of which one is not a
citizen." Moten continues, “The development of the nation and its units is emergence into the antisociality of racial
capitalism, which is predicated upon a metaphysics of static and state-sanctioned completeness that Robinson
describes as 'the terms of order,’” though it should be noted that Robinson construed his approach to “racial
capitalism” as an anthropology. Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously explained his decision to pursue a PhD in
Anthropology rather than History—despite having written the first ever history of the Haitian Revolution in kréyol,
while he was an undergraduate—by explaining that Anthropology was the only discipline to interrogate Western
categories of evidence. But, for Trouillot, what historians and anthropologists treated as evidence was the same:
historicity. The only meaningful distinctions between the disciplines thus stemmed from the way that scholars
periodize. Historicity is concerned with how people inscribe their understanding of the world around them, in which
case the project of anthropology is to explore the discrepancy between how people narrate the world and how

10
institutions organize it (Ralph 2018). But, for neither Robinson nor Trouillot is “blackness” a “metpahysics”
“underived from history and historicity.”
15
After the slave trade to the US was outlawed in 1808, people who wanted to profit from enslaved workers would
either kidnap them, breed them, or rent them from other people. The nation’s emergent industries frequently used
slave labor. And merchants would often insure their enslaved workers before renting them out so that they could
recover most of their value if they died while in someone else’s possession. Because enslaved people acquired
distinct skill sets while working in a broad range of industries and institutional contexts, the value of enslaved
people in nineteenth century insurance policies was different from the way enslaved people were valued in the age f
marine insurance, as cargo. Instead, enslaved people who were rented and thus insured typically fell into one of
three categories: artisans (like blacksmiths, cobblers, and wheelwrights), workers in very dangerous and very
lucrative industries (like steamboats, coal mines, and railroads), or bureaucrats (like drivers, clerks, butlers, and
household managers). See Ralph, Treasury of Weary Souls, as well as Ralph (2018).
16
It is noteworthy that Robinson refers to Marx’s method as a “critique of capitalism” rather than as a “critique of
political economy” [Kritik der politischen Oekonomie] or “critique of capital,” as it is more commonly called
amongst people who find productive insights in this vast body of work. This is a telling formulation for reasons that
will be apparent.

Robinson critiques Marx for fleeing into the illusory realm of “pure logic and speculation”:
17

As Marx put it in 1844: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, supplant the criticism of
weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory, too, will become
material force as soon as it seizes the masses.” Given the miserable social and political chaos of
their era (and of our own), we should have little difficulty in sympathizing with the impulse to
seek political refuge—that is, a social agenda—in the illusory order and power of pure logic and
speculation. (Robinson 1983, xxviii)
Yet, Marx’s position is precisely not what Robinson considers it to be but what Robinson claims he wants to see. As
Marx (1845) famously declared, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world—the point is to change it.”
18
“As Marxists, their apprenticeships proved to be significant but ultimately unsatisfactory. In time, events and
experience drew them toward Black radicalism and the discovery of a collective Black resistance inspired by an
enduring cultural complex of historical apprehension. In these concluding chapters I have attempted to demonstrate
how and why this was so. Taken together, the efforts of Du Bois, James, and Wright consisted of a first step toward
the creation of an intellectual legacy that would complement the historical force of Black struggle. Their destiny, I
suggest, was not to create the idea of that struggle so much as to articulate it. Regardless, the Black opposition to
domination has continued to acquire new forms” (Robinson 1983, 5).
19
Robinson (1983, xxx) ties the appeal of Marxism to its “apparent universalism”:
Unlike the dominant historical discourses of the nineteenth century, historical materialism was
inflected by an internationalism and a scientific rigor which plainly transcended the obnoxious and
sinister claims for destiny exhibited by such conceits as German nationalism.
But this broad assessment of the stakes of Marxism as a political project cannot explain how Fanon (1961), Guevara
(1961), James (1938), Jones (1949), Rodney (1981), Trouillot (1995), Wells (1900), Wynter (1984a, 1984b) and
many others have fashioned Marxism into a critical method concerned with historicizing capital and theorizing
dialectics. In relying on a truncated reading of Marx based on the political stance Robinson associates with it rather
than the critical methods and approach insurgent scholars and activists have adopted, Cedric Robinson understates
how much people in what he calls the Black Radical Tradition developed imaginative new possibilities for theory
and praxis not simply in relation to adopting or rejecting Marx. This insurgent tradition grows from the experience
of Africa and the African diaspora includes a broader range of social actors, as in W.E.B. Du Bois novel, Dark
Princess, which theorizes solidarity between peoples of Africa and South Asia, or his biography of John Brown,
which highlights the purchase of armed insurgency by radical European Americans. In this latter regard, it is worth
noting that Du Bois included John Brown in his pantheon of intellectual and political influences.
20
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois uses “capital” nearly ten times as frequently as “capitalism.”

11
21
“Later, in the colonial settlements, when conditions were favorable, revolts often took the form of marronage, a
concession to the re-location of slavery and to the new, syncretic cultural identities emergent from the social
cauldron of slave organization… And in its most militant manifestation, no longer accustomed to the resolution that
flight and withdrawal were sufficient, the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow
of the whole race-based structure” (Robinson 1983, xxx-xxxi).
22
“Du Bois drew on Hegelian dialectics and Marx's notions of class struggle to correct the interpretations of the
American Civil War and its subsequent Reconstruction period grown dominant in American historiography (for
instance, Woodrow Wilson's A History of the American People[1908]) and popular culture (Thomas Dixon's and D.
W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation [1915]). Undaunted by the fact that he was already on forbidden terrain in the
thinking of Hegel, Marx, and his own American contemporaries, Du Bois ventured further, uncovering the tradition.
Almost simultaneously, James discovered the tradition in the Haitian Revolution. And only a little later, Wright
contributed his own critique of proletarian politics from the vantage point of the Black Radical Tradition. For Du
Bois, James, and Wright, Marxism became a staging area for their immersion into the tradition. Black Marxism was
not a site of contestation between Marxism and the tradition, nor a revision. It was a new vision centered on a theory
of the cultural corruption of race. And thus the reach and cross-fertilization of the tradition became evident in the
anticolonial and revolutionary struggles of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas” (Robinson 1983: 33).
23
“Late-capitalist-law-and-order logics proliferate individualism and privatization as preeminent moral values that
rationalize mass imprisonment by criminalizing the precarious” (Haley 2018: 14).
24
The fact that Sombart’s work has not been taken up more widely—and read more carefully—is puzzling, given
the resurgence of interest in the academic study of capitalism during a twenty-first century moment of enduring
warfare. But then, Sombart is tainted by an affiliation with Nazism, which in the eyes of some people might
invalidate his entire intellectual project.
25
What marks the development of the new concept over the older one (which was still roughly consistent
with Lenin’s notion of a ‘monopoly stage’ of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of
new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above
all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was
little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers. (Jameson 1991, xvii-xviii)
The limits of Jameson’s argument are painfully apparent by the time he glosses “imperialism” as “little more than a
rivalry between the various colonial powers.” We, instead, see “imperialism” as the infrastructure of the system
Jameson is referring to and yet is unable to describe in a way that is precise, reliable, or coherent. As many scholars
of racial capitalism have noted, violence (that is the illicit and extralegal use of force) is a crucial feature of the
system.
26
Geographer David Harvey sees his project as adding a political and economic dimension to the broader discussion
about postmodernism and twentieth century capitalism. Yet, he uses “late capitalism” only four times in The
Condition of Postmodernity (1991). Like Jameson, Harvey treats “late” as “contemporary” when using “late
capitalism” to discuss Jameson’s Postmodernism, then switching to “late twentieth-century capitalism” for the
remainder of his book. In other words, Harvey treats these terms as synonymous, or at least cognate concepts. Each
time, “late capitalism” is used to note the rampant consumerism that Harvey and Jameson argue marks
“postmodernism” as an aesthetic. But, rather than interrogating “late capitalism,” Harvey treats it as a viable way to
explain a “new era” of capitalism that has been pervasive “since the early 1960s.” Harvey uses “late capitalism” to
refer to the economic transformations of the last few decades of the twentieth century rather than—as we show in
the social media usage—a way to grapple with the contradictions that capitalism occasions:
[T]he production of culture ‘has become integrated into commodity production generally: the
frantic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel seeming goods (from clothes to
airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural
function to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.’ The struggles that were once exclusively
waged in the arena of production have, as a consequence, now spilled outwards to make cultural
production an arena of fierce social conflict…. The deployment of advertising as ‘the official art
of capitalism’ brings advertising strategies into art, and art into advertising strategies. (Harvey
1991, 63)

12
For both Harvey and Jameson, capitalism is a state of affairs for which there is no apparent end in sight. For
Jameson, there does not even appear to be any escape; for this reason, we have considered the implications of this
argument at length. But, with the advantage of the past few decades, we can now ask more deliberate questions
about what it means for scholars to proliferate the concept of “late capitalism”—that is, the notion that the newest
phase of capitalism has arrived and is here to stay—at the precise moment when advocates of free market
fundamentalism declared victory, and in the decades to follow?
27
In fact, many people who refer to “late capitalism” cite it only once in a given publication, a trend that even
Sombart followed after publishing Der moderne Kapitalismus (Aldana Reyes 2014; Balmer and Sandland 2012;
Boluk and Lenz 2010; Briggs 2007; Butler-Wall 2015; Dominguez 2009; Drabinski and Harkins 2013; Dumas 2018;
Fry 2012; Halberstam 2012; Kilgore 2013; Makdisi 2010; Powers 2015; Rieder 2015; Sombart 1929; Thompson
2009; Ward 2012).

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