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Ben & Jerry’s marketing campaign for racial justice featured this image.
On July 27, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) platform committee voted on the idea of Medicare for All. The policy was defeated 125 votes to 36. In response, Anand Giridharadas tweeted: “The Democratic Party has once again chosen to be the party of woke oligarchy, of rainbow plutocracy.”
We think that Giridharadas has a point. Generals often wage the last war. People who fight “racial capitalism” are combating a system that played an important role in human history but is already on the way out.
“ Woke capitalism, rather than racial capitalism, is the ascendant order of the day. ”
From our perspective, woke capitalism, not racial capitalism, is the future, though it will not necessarily be any better for most people of color than its earlier, cruder version.
Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism” opens one’s eyes to how race and class have intertwined through history. Medieval Europe was racist, so when it transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, European capitalism relied upon race to structure the economy. A recent article in the New York Review of Books on the slave trade in the West Indies brings this point home. Greatly outnumbered, whites in the Caribbean tortured and killed huge numbers of Blacks in order to maintain their wealth and power.
David Hume’s denial
One way that racial capitalism worked in Jamaica was to deny that Blacks were human. Francis Williams was an educated, wealthy, freeborn Black who eloquently argued for his legal rights. David Hume wrote about him in 1753: “In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe, as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.” One of the greatest early advocates of capitalism could not bring himself to recognize the humanity of a Black man.
That is why we are partly sympathetic to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright’s argument that “racial capitalism is the only sort we’ve ever had.” One cannot make sense of modern Europe or Jamaica without understanding the interpenetration of racism and capitalism. At the same time, we agree with Michael Walzer that the concept of racial capitalism may obfuscate rather than clarify what is going on right now.
Take higher education, a sorting mechanism for employment in capitalism. In the early 20th century, the student body at Harvard University was almost exclusively rich, white men. In 2018, Harvard’s incoming class was more than 155 African-American, nearly 23% Asian-American, and around 12% Latinx. In 2017, Harvard awarded more degrees to women than men.
Who benefits?
The term “woke” refers to being sensitive to, among other things, the importance of demographic diversity in leadership positions. Harvard’s admission policy is woke, but it is not at all clear that the benefits trickle down from its graduates (median starting salary after graduation: $69,200) to the communities from which they come. Even with its racial diversity, most Harvard students come from the nation’s richest families.
At the very least, we ought to recognize that the capitalist economy that dehumanized Francis Williams is not the same kind of capitalism that seeks to diversify the student body of its elite colleges.
The argument that we make here was presaged by Karl Marx in his famous essay, “On the Jewish Question.” According to Marx, capitalism is happy to extend political freedom to more and more people. Capitalism wants a lot of people to work and consume.
Discriminating against laborers or buyers does not make business sense—especially for large corporations with a global reach. But that is a very different thing that granting the majority of people the right to control the means of production.
Woke and exploitative
Capitalism is a pyramid with a small number of owners and managers on top of a large base of workers. Capitalism, to restate Marx’s idea, is woke and exploitative.
To be clear: we agree with many theorists of racial capitalism that capitalism as it currently exists disproportionately harms people of color, if only because the racial wealth gap is concentrated at the top 10% of all races by now, as Matt Bruenig recently noted: “The lower and middle deciles of each racial group own virtually none of their racial group’s wealth.”
Charisse Burden-Stelly observes that “Blackness expresses a structural location at the bottom of the labor hierarchy characterized by depressed wages, working conditions, job opportunities, and widespread exclusion from labor unions.” This seems like an accurate description of places like Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia, or the Bijlmer neighborhood in Amsterdam, Holland and many other such places in rich countries.
The racial capitalism literature enriches our understanding of the racial dynamic of what Marx called primitive accumulation, the seedy side of capitalism that depends on extralegal resource extraction, brutally repressive policing of the underclass, and so forth.
Wokewash
However, racial capitalism does not seem to apply to elite institutions of higher education or modern corporations that have diversified their leadership. “Lesser” organizations may or may not follow this trend, but elite ones set the tone that makes something like cancel culture a widespread reality that can take away the livelihood of (often innocent) ordinary workers.
Capitalism still exploits leadership, but the leadership is becoming evermore rainbow colored. That is why we think that woke capitalism, rather than racial capitalism, is the ascendant order of the day.
To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, the old racial capitalism is dying and the new woke capitalism is not fully born yet. Arguably, woke capitalism is transracial rather than postracial, and it remains to be seen whether a truly postracial capitalism can be achieved.
What is clear is that while the woke transformation of capitalism admittedly improves the opportunities of some people of color, it does little to address the fundamental problems of capital’s exploitation of people and planet, and it may even work as a new legitimation story—call it wokewash—for capitalism’s old racket.
Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. Enzo Rossi is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.
