Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law

Abstract

The theory of racial capitalism offers insights into the relationship between class and race, providing both a structural and a historical account of the ways in which the two are linked in the global economy. Law plays an important role in this. This article sketches what we believe are two key structural features of racial capitalism: profit-making and race-making for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of racemaking. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, racial segregation, and the creation of sacrifice zones, which reflect the strategies and outcomes of profit-making. The structural features of racial capitalism thus are mutually constitutive: profit-making processes create and reinforce the making of racial meaning, while race-making, underwritten by white supremacy, structures and facilitates the economic processes of profit-making. Together, they constitute a global system dependent on the unbridled extraction of wealth from both humans and nature.

Gender, Expulsion, and Law Under Racial Capitalism

“…As Gonzalez and Mutua (2022) demonstrate, exploitation, extraction, expropriation, and expulsion are functional technologies of racial capitalism. They are deployed through institutions.…”

“…In Part II of the essay, I examine racial capitalism and its relationship to social reproduction and intersectionality, arguing that race and gender are co-constitutive frameworks of operation under racial capitalism. Part III focuses on expulsion, building on the work of this symposium's lead article by Carmen G. Gonzalez and Athena Mutua (2022). Parts IV and V demonstrate how gender under racial capitalism operates as a basis for expulsion, focusing on the lives of women and transgender persons as structured by the technologies of law-particularly as they relate to work and the family.…”

Racial Capitalism and the Ecological Crises of the Anthropocene

“…This article seeks to name the economic system that is causing the converging socio-ecological crises we experience today in order to understand the system's logic and distinguish between reforms that entrench the system and those that serve to dismantle it (what André Gorz called non-reformist reforms) (Engler and Engler 2021;Gorz 1967). These converging socio-ecological crises include not only unprecedented ecological destruction, but also extreme economic inequality, the resurgence of right-wing authoritarian ethno-nationalism, increasingly militarized and racialized policing and border control, the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples and others racialized as inferior, and the expulsion to the margins of society of growing numbers of people, including those who are unemployed, incarcerated, and homeless (Gonzalez and Mutua 2022).…”

“…It might also be called white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2013). Racial capitalism is a form of racialized extraction that generates profits for a transnational capitalist class by commandeering the land, labor, and natural wealth of persons racialized as inferior as well as the uncompensated or undercompensated care work performed largely by women (Gonzalez and Mutua 2022). Racial capitalism treats nature as an inert object that can be extracted for profit without any concern for its repair or replenishment and without regard for the racialized persons whose lands are confiscated or polluted, whose livelihoods are destroyed, and whose cultures and communities are fractured and disrupted (Fraser 2021;Moore 2015).…”

“…Racism is a technology of governance that naturalizes socially constructed hierarchies and treats them as the inevitable outgrowths of human physical and cultural difference rather than the product of coercive practices and ideologies (Gonzalez and Mutua 2022). These racialized practices operate within a global regime of profit-making dominated by Euro-descendant White elites.…”