Theorising Race and Class in Contemporary Capitalism - Dr Efthimios Karayiannides
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the explosion of movements fighting for racial justice globally in the 2010s, debates have abounded among both activists and scholars about the relationship between racial domination and economic exploitation. On the one hand, activists have debated the priority which should be given to the struggle against capitalism versus the struggle for racial justice. On the other, recent years have seen an increased scholarly interest in theories of ‘racial capitalism’. This course introduces students to a range of approaches which attempt to integrate analyses of race and racialisation into Marxist and other critical philosophical, sociological and economic perspectives. We will evaluate how different thinkers in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries sought to appropriate and expand Marxist concepts to argue that racialisation and the expansion of capitalist relations of production are coeval and co-constituting historical processes. Some of the questions we will ask in this course, include: ‘Is capitalism essentially racist?’; ‘Does the development of capitalism, on its own, tend to erode or reinforce racial discrimination?’; ‘What is the relationship between the struggles for racial justice and struggles against capitalism?’; ‘How have different traditions within Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition approached the relationship between race and class and what contrasting analytic and practical prescriptions flow from these different approaches?’; ‘How is historical analysis deployed to make sense of the relationship between race and class today?’ and, relatedly, ‘Is contemporary racism best understood as a legacy of pre-capitalist modes of production or colonisation, the result of the coeval emergence of white supremacy and capitalist relations of production as ways of organising society, or are race and class ‘articulated’ differently at various moments in the history of capitalism?’; ‘What is the appropriate unit of analysis for investigations into the relationship between race and class: the nation, the mode of production, or the capitalist world system?’