Raciality Colonizes Our Life-Worlds: Strategizing under Racial Capitalism
An Interview with Gargi Bhattacharyya
November 7, 2024
Gargi Bhattacharyya has long been a leading voice in the renewed debates over racial capitalism. In their 2018 book, Rethinking Racial Capitalism, they complicated overly simplistic strategic discussions by bringing social reproduction theory into the analysis. And in their latest book, Futures of Racial Capitalism, published by Polity Press earlier this year, they explore the role of racial capitalist subjectification in all of this. How do we mobilize against racial capitalism when we are unwittingly in love with our racialized selves? Bhattacharyya spoke with Spectre’s Zachary Levenson about their new book and its implications for Palestine solidarity work, fighting for our lives, and mobilizing against racial capitalism.
In so much writing on racial capitalism, the racial in the couplet is effectively synonymous with “coercion.” In your book, you challenge this formulation, theorizing racial capitalism as productive of new subjectivities that are crucial to continued accumulation. Can you talk a bit about why you think reducing “racial” to “coercive” is limiting and how you theorize racial capitalism otherwise?
That is a tricky and enormous question but probably goes to the heart of my interests. I feel very aware also that my political and intellectual “training” takes place in Britain and the ongoing grappling with the interconnections of race and class in this location. I often feel quite distanced from the manner in which these conversations take place among colleagues in the US. So, from the outset, I warn you that my preoccupations may not be interesting or entertaining to your readership.
Of course, the history of raciality is overwhelmingly one of violence and coercion. However, the processes through which such violent dispossession are and have been achieved cannot be reduced to coercion alone. I am also a bit worried by the implication that capitalism operates through multilayered and complex forms of subjectification and of subject formation, making us even as it dehumanizes us—and this is the case for everything except for raciality. It cannot be that we bracket race away from all other social relations, and to reduce raciality to coercion is a form of doing this.
Capital makes us its subject, and classedness and raciality, among other things, are the modes through which this takes place.
I do think race is always also about violence or the threat of violence. The processes of raciality—categorization, hierarchization, expulsion, expendability—are about diminishment. But couldn’t the same be said about class? And yet we accept more readily, I think (and this may be a UK–Europe lens) that class is lived as a complex set of processes, affiliations, and disciplines. Class may serve as a shorthand for how capital reduces us to instruments of accumulation, but our classed lives are not experienced (and could not operate easily) as nothing but coercion. Capital makes us its subject, and classedness and raciality, among other things, are the modes through which this takes place.
If we frame the workings of capital as only or primarily about coercion, we imply that we are all happily going around our business existing noncoercively in a space outside or beside or before capitalism. Then the big beast of capital brings its extractive violence and makes our relation to it through this coercion. There is, of course, plenty of straightforwardly violent coercion in the remaking of capital, and perhaps we see this most starkly in spaces and communities deemed lesser through the processes of racialization.
However, at the same time, capitalism is a totalizing project. It suffuses our lives and makes us the kinds of humans we are in this moment. However much we seek to remake social relations, this is a project of reconstruction or overthrow from within. So, the subjugated subject may be constrained and brutalized by the forces of classedness and raciality, but the revolutionary subject must also emerge from this machine, as must the everyday self of love and laughter.
Do you see the debates over racial capitalism as yielding any particular strategic insights? What are they?
I think the “debates” are taking place variably, aren’t they? I am not sure that some of the academic push to pin down the “true meaning” of racial capitalism is the best use of our collective time. As I have said ad nauseam, I prefer to think of racial capitalism as a question about the structures and forces that make solidarity seem so elusive. Increasingly I think the return to thinking about racial capitalism is intertwined with the resurgent interest in capitalist infrastructure, with the whole conversation heavily indebted to the multifarious people trying to show us that extraction is at least as foundational to capitalism as exploitation.
All this stuff, as well as being very interesting and instructive in a scholarly sense, is also a reflection of an ongoing tactical debate. Or perhaps it is itself the tactical debate.
Broadly I would characterize my political approach as trying to move toward the consolidation of class power—ours not theirs. The people who are angry about racial capitalism talk think we are distracting from this more urgent priority. Against this, I try to persuade people, comrades, that an illusory class unity is no good to us. Instead, we must understand and meet head-on the manner in which capital disperses us and divides us from each other.
I think the benefit of the analysis of racial capitalism is that it helps us to take our attention beyond the realm of ideology and into a consideration of the materiality of these divisions and this dispersal. Some people are using the ideas of racial capitalism to strategize in the face of the segmentation of economic space and time. Others use these ideas to build anticapitalist movements around rent and around care, or to chart the connections between workers’ rights and environmental crisis.
The people who are interested in the suggestive frameworks of racial capitalism, in the UK at least, are the ones who are building the most exciting and unexpected networks of solidarity. I say in the book that I’m trying to embrace and promote the necessary incompleteness of the work. My hope is that the fragment of my analysis calls out to others who bring additional insights, in the process taking us all a little further, able to see and be with and support each other just a little bit more.
I see the tactical contribution of racial capitalism talk occur like this, as a nudge or a suggestion, a way of looking at the complex challenges before us and suddenly thinking, “Oh yeah, I see how this bit fits together now.” I don’t think attention to racial capitalism is the basis of a complete program, and I also think that, if there is still a role for the formulation of complete programs, that work will not emanate from the university. But the more modest and yet essential contribution of helping people to see the world and possible points of intervention toward freedom, that is a tactical benefit arising from the study of racial capitalism.
I know you’ve been active in the Palestine solidarity movement in the UK. While I’ve seen some powerful writing applying the racial capitalism framework to Palestine, often in conjunction with analyses of settler colonialism, I’m wondering how the strategic insights you discussed responding to the previous question might carry over into Palestine solidarity work. And more specifically, your potent amalgam of social reproduction theory and racial capitalism seems especially well suited to the Palestine liberation struggle. How do you think about concrete strategies in relation to your theoretical work on racial capitalism and social reproduction theory?
I want to start by saying everyone who has any slight attention to the world is active in Palestine solidarity right now. All other politics is refracted through this genocide. In the UK, there has been an unprecedented enlargement of protest movements. There have been many, many mobilizations—enormous national marches and smaller local demonstrations, lobbies, blockades, shutdowns, and stunts. And much of this has emerged outside any easily recognizable organization.
The recognizable groups are there, of course, both the longstanding Palestine solidarity groups and the many strands of the Left. But the mass numbers of engagement emerge from many forms of self-organization. So, I am not sure that there is a way of being human in this moment which does not include redirecting all the energy that we can to stopping genocide.
I think it might be better to junk the term “activist” altogether. It seems to be so incorporated into the constructions and rhetoric of the other side, and so painfully used to target and divert our inevitably depleted and hungry selves. In times of horror, who doesn’t want to be recognized as an “activist”? But I think we all also know, deep down, that this is not it. And there is something both distorting and actually dangerous about the endless proclamations of what we are doing and why and against whom. Let us return to being a bit more quiet, maybe silly, maybe hard to recognize. Let us care enough not to let our enemies see the full extent or pattern of our forces.
When people say, as they have started saying (although, back to my snarky point about this being mainly in the US), “You are also an activist, so what do you think about x, y, z?” I feel a bit suspicious. I expect people who are serious about remaking the world to do their best to join with others and to contribute what they can to what must be done. In the process—and I do not suggest this is easy, but it is necessary—we must all somehow quieten our own noisy egos.
Our power rests in our ability to act as one, to join the masses and be lost in the collective subject.
Our power rests in our ability to act as one, to join the masses and be lost in the collective subject. We might use our specialist skills in this or that task, as other comrades also do. We might also write and reflect, or summarize and contemplate, or facilitate and note-take. But the thing we are doing, and that matters, is only what we do with others.
I do think, in a small way, the resurgence of interest in questions of racial capitalism and of social reproduction has helped to inform a renewed conversation about Palestine and the global order. This is largely because these are analytic frames that help us to comprehend what the forces of domination want to take from us.
As we are seeing, people are using this expanded understanding of how capital is remade to find the pressure points and unexpected opportunities for disruption, while remaining attentive to the specificity of particular targets. That rebuilding of a collective ability to disrupt, capture, divert, and shut down, in a manner that is attentive to the workings of capital but not dogmatic about the proper site(s) of class politics, that feels like a renewal enabled, in part, through some popularized thinking about racial capitalism.
You make the point in your new book that racial capitalism helps us understand why capitalism no longer necessarily generates its own gravedigger, as Marx and Engels memorably put it. Here, “racial” seems to map onto surplus, as in, the production of populations superfluous to accumulation. On the other hand, later in the book, you theorize various ways that racialization stratifies labor markets, cheapens labor power, and so forth. Why do you think racial capitalism potentially inhibits the development of the revolutionary agency of the proletariat?
I don’t think populations rendered “surplus” are superfluous to accumulation. Quite the contrary—I think the processes of rendering “surplus” are central to the machinery of accumulation. Neither would I say that racial capitalism inhibits revolutionary agency necessarily. What I think is described through the formulation of racial capitalism is the multiplicity of the proletariat. Such a multiplicity is proletarianized through such diverse means that the more mechanical approaches to class struggle must be rethought entirely.
What is the place of politics if we truly believe that the structural dynamics of capitalism will render up a fully formed, coherent, and unified class subject?
In fact, our side has been struggling with this idea from the start. What is the place of politics if we truly believe that the structural dynamics of capitalism will render up a fully formed, coherent, and unified class subject? If we really believed that we would not need to organize at all. However, that is not what we think, is it? Most of us, most of time, act as if the efforts of political organizing are necessary and unavoidable. What the analytic framework of racial capitalism might do is help us to target our energies or to understand the interconnections between apparently disconnected segments of the population or the economy.
In particular, the racial capitalism analytic has been urgent and useful in contributing to a language that illuminates the manner in which capitalist theft and violence, as well as less theatrical modes of coercion, conspire to appropriate value from the things we do to stay alive. I do understand this remains a fractious question on the Left. But I also think posing the question—of what range of experiences might be included in proletarianization and how we think of comprehending and organizing in all these spaces—is essential if we are to move towards survival and freedom.
The horrors of the world, both climate catastrophe and the violence unleashed in this phase of capitalist restructuring, make it increasingly implausible to retreat into an overly narrow and nostalgic “class first” politics. The manner in which humans are corralled, forced into varieties of activity that replenish capital but deplete human and other life, prevented with violence from accessing the means of life—all of this reveals so painfully that we are living through a time in which capital will extract our lifeblood in a variety of ways.
So many people now recognize that it is capitalism that is killing us and killing the planet—that recognition is the rumbling of a reconstituted class consciousness. So, our job is to be part of that unpredictable, desperate, energizing battle for life, because our survival relies on there being more than one way to dig a grave, doesn’t it?
What role do you see the state playing in racial capitalist development? I’m wondering to what extent you see the state here as a terrain of struggle, as enemy territory, or as relatively marginal to the current debate?
That is so hard to answer—and, you are right, it is because I am uncertain about the shape(s) of the state now and how we might think about our orientation to the state on the journey to dismantling capitalism. Following many others, I try to point to the manner in which “the state” in a lot of places has ramped up its punitive and disciplinary aspects. In discussions of earlier modes of racial capitalism, the state and/or the law operate as important aspects of the creation and maintenance of racialized boundaries.
Capital finds its opportunities in conjunction with this landscape of enforced differentiation. For much of the documented history of racial capitalism, this has included strictly enforced forms of apartheid, differential protection or inclusion in law, and the active creation and maintenance of the status (or statuses) of the racially subordinated. This is the summary of settler colonialism and of the plantation state, of empire, and of the racial state.
In our current moment, however, the role of the state has altered. Most of the world does not institute overt apartheid and instead the racialized regulation of economic and social relations occurs through coded means. This makes it more difficult to understand the role of the state in racial capitalism, and I think this reflects a broader uncertainty in our moment of the character and activity of the capitalist state. The varieties of state activity and nonactivity that have arisen as supplements to financial capital operate to disperse human lives and livelihoods somewhat differently. And here I am at the edge of my own understanding.
In my own circles, it has been some time since anticapitalists sought to capture the state. And in reality, much of the work of recent years has been focused, necessarily, on combating and disrupting state violence. I am very interested, actually, in how we imagine the infrastructural requirements of building a new world—which I take to be the twenty-first century formulation of the question about the state and what is to be done. Maybe this is a conversation that could be continued more widely elsewhere?
I really like your formulation “value scraping,” which you develop at various points in the book. You describe this process as one of “scraping…value from human lives without passing through the wage relation,” counterposing value scraping to exploitation.1Gargi Bhattacharyya, The Futures of Racial Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 14; see also 4 and 33 on tying value scraping to social reproduction. I found your tying of “value scraping” to social reproduction particularly useful. Do you see value scraping as inherent in racial capitalism? What role does it play?
I started using the somewhat clunky phrase “value scraping” because the arguments I was retrieving and remaking worked to complicate and decenter exploitation. Exploitation is a form of value scraping that summarizes a very particular set of social and economic relations. The whole theory of surplus value is contained within that term. So, if a person wishes to suggest that the extraction of value does not occur only through the wage relation, then the term “exploitation” is no longer sufficient.
Value scraping tries to point to the manner in which the supplement to capital taken from social reproduction and the varieties of extractivism that remake capital can be understood as central components of accumulation. The wage relation is another form of value scraping—so having a catch all term, however inelegant, makes it easier to see the links and continuities between these different ways that capital siphons value away from life and into its own remaking. I hope using a term like value scraping can also work to guard against inadvertent return to less productive ways of thinking about racialized differentiation.
Racial capitalism is also a question about how capital is remade—so liberal accounts of racism, based on aversion or attitudes perhaps, cannot help us to understand this dynamic. I do understand that some of the people who are most agitated by the phrase “racial capitalism” are responding to the term “racial.” For them, that is a term that has no place in the analysis of capitalist dynamics because it belongs to the realm of irrational ideas.
Rather than try to persuade this resistant readership that race really does matter (not least because others are taking on this particular thankless task already), I prefer to frame the discussion as a question about how capital is remade. If people really look at the world and still do not believe that capital steals our life force through a variety of mechanisms and relations, well, maybe they don’t feel it is that urgent to dismantle capitalism as we know it.
I admittedly love your emphasis on humor, pleasure, and what you call “being ridiculous” in the book—especially in its conclusion. Of course, critics will complain that you’re trying to throw a party in a capitalist prison. Why are they wrong? Where does this focus on pleasure get us from a strategic standpoint?
I am interested in fun and in games and in pleasure, but I am not pointing to these things as forms of resistance. Maybe sometimes staying alive is resistance, but that is not sufficient for the anticapitalist project. However, I do think it is important to remember that capital does not take over our lives through force alone.
Raciality colonizes our life-worlds, and we know ourselves—even our most intimate, silly, pleasure-seeking, joyful selves—through its lens.
There is also seduction, not the least the deep seduction of subjectification. I have been trying to make space to understand that people are also in love with their racialized selves. Raciality colonizes our life worlds, and we know ourselves—even our most intimate, silly, pleasure seeking, joyful selves—through its lens. Building a new world also requires some reckoning with this: what being in love with our racialized selves might imply for political organization and revolutionary agency, what the pleasures of raciality do to our relations to each other.
We might think of this as a continuation of another perennial challenge for anticapitalists, and perhaps for all liberatory movements: how can we imagine freedom from this degraded present? We must organize together towards something that we collectively want, but our wants are products of the world we seek to dismantle.
Plenty of left theorizing and strategizing over the last century or so has circled around this question of how people experience themselves and what these existing forms of subjectification mean for revolutionary politics. Mainly, our side has sought simultaneously to build organizational structures that remake (some of) our relations to each other, in the process remaking some aspects of self, and to make a politics that speaks to how people dream of freedom, a dream cobbled together with the unlikely resources of now. I don’t think we can build the world-changing politics that we need without some understanding of what and how people want. I’m trying to write something about that next.
The call to be ridiculous is a bit different. Overall, the terms of racial capitalism also summarize how capital can wrongfoot us each time we reach for an over-totalizing and/or static analysis. Racial capitalism is a shorthand to point to processes through which capital can run multiple, segmented, dispersed routes to accumulation. It’s to point to how capital can adapt opportunistically to occupy political and/or material fissures. And it’s to remind us to remain alert to the endless flighty flexibility of capital, shapeshifting before our eyes just when we think we have learned all there is to learn.
I have been trying to think about how allowing ourselves to be ridiculous—in our necessarily partial analyses, in our unscientific hope, in our ability to keep going when every reasonable view suggests that we cannot avoid defeat—is part of the work. It is also freeing (or has been for me) to shed the constraints of ideas of intellectual seriousness or leadership framed by our enemies. It doesn’t matter how we conduct ourselves; they are not our audience. We have to be audacious, and that means we risk being ridiculous at least some of the time. ×
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Notes & References
- Gargi Bhattacharyya, The Futures of Racial Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 14; see also 4 and 33 on tying value scraping to social reproduction.