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In recent years, activists and scholars have increasingly turned to the notion of racial capitalism to examine a range of topics, from the role of slavery in the development of the modern economy to the uneven effects of capitalism on nonwhite populations. Yet the meaning, scope, and political implications of this concept are deeply contested. Why has this idea provoked fierce debate? What can critical theory learn from engaging with the framework of racial capitalism and its use by social movements? How might reworking this framework push left politics and thinking to better understand our historical moment?
This book develops a critical theory of racial capitalism and argues that it is indispensable to understanding and contesting the neoliberal present. Challenging deracialized left critiques of neoliberalism, Siddhant Issar reconfigures the paradigm of racial capitalism to illuminate the relationships among anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and capital accumulation. He historicizes the neoliberal era, examining American capitalism’s changing yet durable long-term entanglements with gendered logics of racial and colonial domination. Bringing together political theory, Black studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and critical political economy with the knowledge production of social movements, Reckoning with Racial Capitalism calls for a reorientation of left politics beyond zero-sum framings of antiracist, anticolonial, and anticapitalist struggles.
— Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
Reckoning with Racial Capitalism is among the most important critical theory texts of the post-2008 interregnum in its convincing explication of the centrality of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism to capitalism and neoliberalism. Siddhant Issar offers a timely and unimpeachable rebuttal of both leftist screeds against "identity politics" and critiques of Western Marxism as irrelevant to, and detracting from, real class analysis.
— Charisse Burden-Stelly, author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
Reckoning with Racial Capitalism does what I wish all academic texts did: It recognizes Black and Indigenous social movements as theorists who can and should guide not only our collective knowledge about capitalism but also our collective struggle to free all life from the racial, colonial, and patriarchal violence that makes capitalism tick.
— Melanie K. Yazzie, coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation
The framework of 'racial capitalism' was originally forged in the context of a mass struggle against a regime of racial domination, exploitation, and dispossession. In this book, Issar simultaneously returns us to these political roots while bringing it into the present conjuncture. He deftly reveals the imbrications of white supremacy, colonial dispossession, and neoliberal financialization, addressing Black and Indigenous social movements as fellow theorists and co-conspirators, all the while inciting us to solidaristic collective struggle to forge alternatives beyond the given world.
— Robert Nichols, author of Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory
Siddhant Issar’s Reckoning with Racial Capitalism offers an account of U.S. racial capitalism that encompasses settler colonialism and uses it to theorize neoliberalism anew, accounting for the uneven work of capital’s violence within it. To understand this unevenness, Issar grounds neoliberalism in the history of racial, colonial, and patriarchal domination and explicates how they are articulated with the exploitation of the working class and emerging financialization and privatization. A great achievement!
— Inés Valdez, author of Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The (Re)Turn to Racial Capitalism: Neoliberalism and Left Critique in the Era of Black Lives Matter
2. Toward a Critical Theory of Racial Capitalism
3. Theorizing Racial/Colonial Primitive Accumulation: Settler Colonialism, Racial Slavery, and the Capital Relation
4. Financialization, Property, and Racial/Colonial Expropriation: (Re)Examining the Great Recession
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography