How is capitalism racial? Fanon, critical theory and the fetish of antiblackness (White, 2020)

by Hylton White (2020), Social Dynamics, 46:1, 22-35.

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ABSTRACT
I outline a proposal for an analysis of antiblackness grounded by the Marxist critique of the fetishistic forms of capitalist society. Traditionally, Marxist accounts of antiblackness turn, not to Marx’s theory of fetishism, but rather to dynamics of class formation under capitalist development, and hence to the ways that class formation motivates types of racism, including antiblackness. But accounts like these do not explain the distinctive features of modern antiblackness. Turning to the Marxist critique of fetishism, I argue for an account of the distinctive features of modern antiblackness, by bringing into conversation: (a) comments by Fanon on negrophobia and the relations between antiblackness and antisemitism; and (b) work by Postone on the fetishistic nature of modern antisemitism. I argue that antisemitism and antiblackness afford a pair of devices for falsely concretising the structure of alienation that produces the apparent opposition of labour and capital. These devices present the pathologies of modernity as stemming not from capitalist social relations but rather from the apparently essential powers of antisocial races: the Jew of antisemitism, caricatured as cunning will without productive bodily expenditure, and the Black of antiblack racism, caricatured as biological energy that lacks self-governing will. READ PDF

Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation with Paul Gilroy (2020)

This conversation was recorded on 7th June 2020 – Soundcloud here

(see also: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition and Prisons and Class Warfare and Is Prison Necessary?)

Paul Gilroy: Well hello, I’m Paul Gilroy, I’m the Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of Racism and Racialisation at University College, and today I’m going to be talking to Ruth Wilson Gilmore who is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Ruthie is a co-founder of the California Prison Moratorium Project and perhaps most importantly of all, of critical resistance, and she’s the author of the prize-winning book that will be very familiar to you, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. And Ruthie and I have been collaborating, editing, bringing together Stuart Hall’s writings on race which will be published – well I hope soon, given the situation we’re in. Maybe you should correct anything that I haven’t said about you Ruthie that you want to have said, and I want to make a point about Stuart – Stuart’s work.