For Black anticolonial thinkers like James and Du Bois, as well as Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Orlando Patternson, Cedric Robinson, and others, it has been urgent and necessary to address the exclusion of Blacks and Africans from Hegel’s understanding of world history, and to rework Marxism to envision an emancipatory politics that would address the contradictions of colonialism and slavery. Although Hegel’s denial of history and humanity to Africa is not explicitly stated by Marx, Western Marxism has contributed to a European historical model that opposes capitalism to slavery, and that cannot recognise Black slaves and colonized subjects as actors in history and historical change. For the critique of capitalist political economy that focuses on wage labor as the site of alienation, and on the capital–wage labor relation as the full development of commodity production that structures capitalism and announces the capitalist era, slavery is situated as “precapitalist,” rather than specifically embedded in colonial capitalism, or coterminous and interdependent with a spectrum of other labors. By positioning slavery as external or prior to capitalism, not integral to it, the Marxist critique of capitalism is unable to grasp the complex combination of both waged and unwaged labor that makes up relations of production in modern capitalism. When privileging industrialized Europe and North America as the sites of mature capitalism, Marxism not only fails to recognize slave labor as labor, but it denies the role of slavery as the formative condition for wage labor and industrialization, over [and] against which “free labor” was posed. As Cedric Robinson observes in Black Marxism, “At its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction–a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediates, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures.”1 In his work on the Black radical tradition, Cedric Robinson built upon James, Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney and others to observe the significance of Black labor in the history of industrial capitalism, when African slavery provided the necessary agricultural labor just as Europeans moved to factory work. In Robinson’s analysis, capitalism has been always “racial capitalism”; that is, the organization, expansion, and ideology of capitalist society was expressed through race, racial subjection, and racial differences.
The term racial capitalism captures the sense that actually existing capitalism exploits through culturally and socially constructed differences such as race, gender, region, and nationality, and is lived through those uneven formations; it refuses the idea of a “pure” capitalism external to, or extrinsic from, the racial formation of collectivities and populations, or that capitalism’s tendency to treat labor as abstract equivalent units does not contravene its precisely calibrated exploitation of social differences and particularities2. Robinson states: “I use the term racial capitalism to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as historical agency. From its very foundations capitalism had never been–any more than Europe–a closed system.”3 What Robinson elaborates as “racial capitalism” includes the settler colonial dispossession of land and removal of indigenous peoples, the colonial slavery that extracted labor from people to whom it denied human being, and the racialized exploitation of immigrants from around the world–making the political sphere of human rights and representation the precise location that permits and sustains the violent inequality issuing from the longer history of slavery, colonial settlement and occupation, and capitalist exploitation.4 Furthermore, racial capitalism suggests that capitalism expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and markets across the world identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions, identifying particular regions for production and others for neglect, certain populations for exploitation and still others for disposal.
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015): 148-150.
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