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Melamed Racial Capitalism
Melamed Racial Capitalism
REFERENCES
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Critical Ethnic Studies
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Racial Capitalism
JODI MELAMED
P 76 O
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agricultural population off the land and to usurp the commons. This dis-
possessed agricultural population—the majority of people—through the
breaking up of the bonds that connected them to their lands, each other,
and structures of governance (now in transition), were “dragged from their
accustomed way of life” and forcibly made to occupy the role of a proto-
proletariat, which “could not possibly be absorbed into the nascent manu-
factures as fast as it was thrown upon the world.”20 Workless members of
the emerging working class were “chastised for their enforced transforma-
tion into beggars and paupers” and treated as “‘voluntary’ criminals,” as if
“it was entirely within their powers to go on working under the old condi-
tions which in fact no longer existed.”21 First, the racial capitalist work of the
“bloody” legislation against vagabonds makes it impermissible to recognize
people without work as having (lost) the claim to land and their former
social being. Second, it disqualifies them as relational beings in the present
because the capital relation that now dominantly binds them to the social
also separates them out as useless, immoral, and disposable. Out of the sever
ing of relations necessary for capital accumulations, the vagabond emerges
as a racialized status whose members can be blamed for their own past
expropriability and present precarity. Marx vividly summarizes the proto-
racializing work that vagabondage laws do to mark the body of wageless
people as different and criminal, forcing “idlers” to work with whips and
chains, branding the forehead or ears with the letter “S” for slave, and “exe-
cuting” runaways or those who remain idle “without mercy as felons.”22
Perhaps the best example of manufacturing densely connected social
separateness, which is racial capitalism’s hallmark, is Marx’s discussion of
the twinned and symbiotic development of colonialism and the credit sys-
tem (fledgling finance capitalism). Marx describes this development as a
dual system of whitewashing, where the capital gained through expropria-
tion in one system—colonialism or credit-baiting—enters into the other
system, appearing neutral, clean, and earned through right. Thus “the trea-
sures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and
murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital
there,” while “a great deal of [investment] capital, which appears today in
the United States without any birth certificate, was yesterday in England,
the capitalized blood of children.”23 Capital partitions, divides, and sepa-
rates groups between political geographies and is the dominant relation to
flow between and bind them. What is stripped out are other (and other
possible) relations to land, resources, activity, community, and other pos-
sible social wholes that have been broken up for capital. Where capital
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NOTES
1. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 899.
2. Annie Lowrey, “The Rich Get Richer Through the Recovery,” New York
Times, September 10, 2013, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/the-rich
-get-richer-through-the-recovery/.
3. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
6. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
7. Ibid., 54.
8. See Lisa Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminaliza-
tion of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), and Jodi Byrd,
The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2011).
9. I thank Chandan Reddy for this formulation.
10. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global
Change: Remapping the World, ed. R. J. Johnston et al. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell,
2002), 261.
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11. Ruth Wilson Gilmore “Partition,” keynote presented at “Decolonize the City!
Decoloniale Perspektiven auf die Neoliberal Stadt,” Berlin, September 21–23, 2012.
12. I thank Macarena Gómez-Barris for this formulation.
13. My formulation here is inspired by the call for the symposium, assemblages
& affinities: reimagining interdisciplinarity held on September 23, 2013, at the Univer-
sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It is no doubt the brainchild of the symposium’s
esteemed organizers: Jodi Byrd, Lisa Marie Cacho, Karen Flynn, Isabel Molina, and
Siobhan Sommerville.
14. Cathy Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the
Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 1
(2004): 30.
15. Robinson, Black Marxism, 308.
16. Ibid., 171.
17. Marx, Capital, 873.
18. Ibid., 874.
19. Ibid., 896–904.
20. Ibid., 896.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 897.
23. Ibid., 918.
24. Ibid., 926.
25. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early
Writings, ed. Quentin Hoare (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 328.
26. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. Quen-
tin Hoare (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 230.
27. Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Coruz, eds., Paradigm Wars: Indigenous
Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006), 3.
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