Racial Capitalism
Abstract
Accumulation under capitalism is necessarily the expropriation of labor, land, and resources. But it is also something else: we need a more apposite language to think about capital as a system of expropriating violence on collective life itself. To this end, one way to strengthen racial capitalism as an activist hermeneutic is to use it to name and analyze the production of social separateness—the disjoining or deactivating of relations between human beings (and humans and nature)—needed for capitalist expropriation to work. Considering racial capitalism as a technology of antirelationality reveals its weakness as much as its strength; for acts of racialized violence that would partition people from other senses and practices of social being (noncapitalist, nonstate) are as futile as they are constant.
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Capitalism has relied on the consistent oppression of racial minorities and undervaluation and invisibilization of women's work, transforming them from coproducers of common wealth into reproducers of the capitalist workforce.
“This means acknowledging that -beyond proletary exploitation and dispossession -capitalism has relied on the consistent oppression of racial minorities and undervaluation and invisibilization of women's work, transforming them from coproducers of common wealth into reproducers of the capitalist workforce (Federici, 2004;Melamed, 2015).”
From Intersectional climate justice: A conceptual pathway for bridging adaptation planning, transformative action, and social equity (2022) · cites this paper as Melamed, 2015
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- Authors
- Melamed, J.
- Corresponding author
- Jodi Melamed
- Venue
- Critical Ethnic Studies
- Publisher
- Project MUSE
- Published
- 2015
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 76
- ISSN
- 2373-5031 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4213438226
- Cited by
- 1,298
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 173 · 2025: 273 · 2024: 186 · 2023: 206 · 2022: 169 · 2021: 107 · 2020: 81 · 2019: 79 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 4
- FWCI
- 26.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Critical Ethnic Studies (publishedVersion)
- e-Publications@Marquette (Marquette University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
- Keywords
- racial capitalism, capitalist accumulation, expropriation, racialized violence, collective life, land dispossession, hermeneutics
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