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Cited by 119Political Economy and MarxismDecolonial Thought and EpistemologiesMarxism and Critical Theory

Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism

Issar, Siddhant·2021·Race & Class
DOI 10.1177/0306396821996273
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Abstract

This article reconceptualises the Marxist notion of ‘primitive accumulation’, examining how settler colonialism and anti-Black racial domination structure American capitalism. The analysis intervenes in theorisations of primitive accumulation in both critiques of neoliberalism and the growing literature on racial capitalism. It shows how particular appropriations of primitive accumulation in the context of neoliberalism not only treat the concept as, ultimately, external to the core logic of capitalism, but also ignore the ways racial domination and colonisation configure capital’s violence. Simultaneously, within racial capitalism scholarship, primitive accumulation is prone to conceptual stretching, often flattening disparate forms of land and labour expropriation. In contrast, through the analytic of ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’, the author elucidates how normative wage-labour exploitation is predicated on settler colonialism and racial slavery and its afterlives. This thus adds precision to received understandings of capitalist expropriation, while also pushing the literature on racial capitalism beyond a white/Black binary.

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Research works printed but not linked: 31

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  13. The last few years have witnessed a veritable explosion in scholarly and activist work on race and capitalism. In tandem with the emergence of Black Lives Matter, and often explicitly marshalling Cedric Robinson’s concept of ‘racial capitalism’, this scholarship demonstrates the ways racial domination and capital accumulation reciprocally condition each other. See, for example, Robinson C., Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Melamed J. ’Racial capitalism’, Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015), pp. 76–85; Kelley R. ’Introduction’, in Johnson W., Kelley R. D. G., eds, Race, Capitalism, Justice (Boston Review, 2017); Issar S. ’Listening to Black Lives Matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism’, Contemporary Political Theory (2020); Burden-Stelly C. ’Modern U.S. racial capitalism: some theoretical insights’, Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (2020). For an excellent overview of Robinson’s critique of ‘Marxism’s blind spots’, see Gordon A. ’Cedric Robinson’s anthropology of Marxism’, Race & Class, 47, no. 2 (2005), pp. 23–38.
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  19. Byrd, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South, 1
  20. Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property, 102
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  31. See, for example, Wacquant L. ‘From slavery to mass incarceration’, New Left Review II, no. 13 (2002), pp. 41–60; Murch D. ’Paying for punishment’, Text, Boston Review , 21 July 2016, http://bostonreview.net/editors-picks-us/donna-murch-paying-punishment

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Authors
Issar, S.
Corresponding author
Issar, Siddhant
Venue
Race & Class
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2021-04-09
Volume
63
Issue
1
Pages
23-50
ISSN
  • 0306-3968 (ISSN-L)
  • 1741-3125
DOI
10.1177/0306396821996273
OpenAlex
W3152903838
Semantic Scholar
d79ef5ebe5c2d34b655ae28c6797da26787288b6
Cited by
119
References
36
Citations by year
2026: 14 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 53 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 24 · 2021: 2
FWCI
26.58
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
Locations
Race & Class (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Marxism and Critical Theory
Keywords
primitive accumulation, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, slavery, neoliberalism, Marxist theory, land expropriation, American capitalism, colonial violence

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