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You can't have capitalism without racism

Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism

In recent years, “racial capitalism” has ascended across the humanities and social sciences. It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 03 (July-August 2020)
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African American migratory workers in front of a 'juke joint' in Belle Glade, Florida (February 1941)

Race Is About More Than Discrimination

Organized labor—based on white-exclusive and later white-dominated, though not necessarily exclusive, trade unions—formed itself as part of the settler state, not in the sense of being an apparatus of the state, but in the sense of accepting certain important precepts. The unions took for granted the nature of the settler state and, as such, conceived that the unions were to exist to serve the “legitimate” population, or at least the working class of the legitimate population. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 03 (July-August 2020)
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Poultry workers cut and trim chicken

Poultry and Prisons

Poultry-processing work lies within a larger web of carceral geographies that extend beyond the prison walls into factory floors, neighborhoods, and schools. These geographies depend on and are produced through racism, as the production of unequal vulnerability to premature death. Racial capitalism connects the poultry plant to the prison alongside the movement for abolition beyond the prison. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 03 (July-August 2020)
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Virus also reawakens Wests racism

The Yellow Plague and Romantic Anticapitalism

COVID-19 is a great revealer, laying bare the structures of racial disposability that have sacrificed people, from migrant detainees to meat packers. We are also witness to the rise of anti-Asian violence. Brutal attacks against Asian Americans have exposed the fraudulence of the model minority myth and the assimilationist paradigm that legitimizes state violence against Black and Brown bodies. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 03 (July-August 2020)
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Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution

Racial Capital from Pan-Africanism and Coloniality to Epistemic Rupture

The history and nature of racial capitalism remain primary questions of our times. Its true significance and gravity threaten to reveal everything about our contemporary world, from our immediate social arrangements to the global system. Within this, corporate power and the hegemonic culture shape the world at the limits of our perceptions. We must simultaneously engage the contemporary politics of knowledge production around these issues, both within the academy and in popular culture. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 03 (July-August 2020)
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The Civil War in the United States by Karl Marx

Marx and Slavery

The rise to prominence of analyses of racial capitalism represents a breakthrough in Marxian theory. This has necessarily been accompanied by a critique of previous Marxian analyses, which all too often ignored or minimized the relation of slavery to capitalism. In recent years, however, these criticisms of orthodox Marxist treatments of slavery have been extended, much more problematically, to the work of Karl Marx himself. Although Marx never wrote a treatise on slavery, the issue of slave labor was woven into his analysis of social formations, both ancient and modern, and was inextricably intertwined with his treatment of wage labor. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 03 (July-August 2020)
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Monthly Review Volume 72, Number 2 (June 2020)

June 2020 (Volume 72, Number 2)

The current massive oil glut is the product of the effects of the tight oil or shale oil revolution, which for a time turned the United States into the biggest oil and gas producer in the world. Now, suddenly as a result of an overproduction of world oil, made far worse by the sudden falloff in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are witnessing the possible euthanasia of the U.S. tight oil industry, bleeding cash even before the oil price collapse and encumbered with mountains of debt. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 02 (June 2020)
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Global logistics concept illustration

COVID-19 and Catastrophe Capitalism

Since the late twentieth century, capitalist globalization has increasingly adopted the form of interlinked commodity chains controlled by multinational corporations, connecting various production zones, primarily in the Global South, with the apex of world consumption, finance, and accumulation primarily in the Global North. COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed by capitalism. | more…

2020, Volume 72, Issue 02 (June 2020)
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