As a result, questions of race and racism were effectively ceded to thinkers working in the liberal and poststructuralist paradigms. With the waning of New Left radicalism and the collapse of really existing Communism, capitalism ceased to be viewed as a topic of serious interrogation in many quarters, while Marxism was increasingly rejected as dépassé. Subsequently, however, the question of capitalism’s entanglement with race dropped off the critical-theoretical agenda. At least through the 1980s, their reflections were at the forefront of what we now call “critical race theory.” 1 Although their approaches diverged in specifics, each of these thinkers grappled deeply with the capitalism/ racism nexus. Kelley, Cedric Robinson, and Cornel West. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Stuart Hall, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Barbara Fields, Robin D. This tradition, which flourished from the 1930s through the 1980s, includes such towering figures as C. They form the heart of a profound but under-appreciated stream of critical theorizing, known as Black Marxism. What is the nature of this entanglement? Is it contingent or structural? Did the capitalism/racism nexus arise by chance, and could matters have in principle been otherwise? Or was capitalism primed from the get-go to divide populations by “race”? And what about today? Is racism hardwired in the deep structure of contemporary capitalism? Or is a nonracial capitalism finally possible now, in the twenty-first century? In all of its forms to date, capitalist society has been entangled with racial oppression. Despite the clear differences between them, none of these forms of “really existing” capitalism was nonracial.

Nor can anyone reasonably doubt that racial oppression persists in the deindustrializing, sub-prime, mass-incarceration capitalism of the present era. But it is equally true of the Jim Crow industrialized capitalism of the twentieth century.

That proposition clearly holds for the slave-based plantation capitalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred fourteenth Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, GA, on January 5, 2018.Ĭapitalism has always been deeply entangled with racial oppression.

Marx means of production synonym