Mills's goal in setting apart a concept of racial exploitation was to ground a case for wealth redistribution in the liberal-democratic norms of equality that supposedly accompany capitalism. His claim was that while the ideology of capitalism does not provide the tools to recognize class exploitation as such, it can acknowledge the wrong of racial exploitation. In these cases of racial exploitation, primarily but not entirely in the past, explicit status distinctions between black and white people correspond to differential opportunities in the marketplace. But liberal-democratic norms say that everyone must be treated as free and equal-in contrast to, for example, the status distinctions of feudalism. So cases where people were barred from capitalist competition will be cases where the output of the capitalist process is illegitimate. And illegitimacy in particular cases and transactions, on and on for centuries, will translate to the deep illegitimacy of the current wealth distribution. The project, then, was to argue that because the liberal-democratic norms have been systematically violated, the property claims that have resulted from processes in violation of those norms are unjust, and thus that redress is owed. Mills claims that transactions are illegitimate when people are formally barred from participating, not when they are merely disadvantaged in participating. Mills writes elsewhere, "Presuming the competition was fair by capitalist norms, [poor white] children will be disadvantaged in escaping their parents' status, but not barred... To be on a lower rung of the social ladder because of bad luck in the social lottery is different from being on a lower rung because of social oppression that denies equal personhood." 8 2 If people are excluded from certain transactions or from entering certain kinds of pools that make wealth accumulation easier (attending certain schools, living in certain neighborhoods) because they cannot afford to do so, that does not contravene capitalist norms; if they are excluded because of belonging to a racial group, it does. So it is crucial that Mills be able to distinguish between racial exploitation and class exploitation. The claim that some transactions can be seen, from the dominant perspective, as legitimate (because they constitute mere class exploitation) while others are illegitimate (because they constitute racial exploitation) is what makes it the case that there should be a redistribution in service of a nonracial capitalism rather than a socialist revolution eliminating private ownership of the means of production altogether. But I have argued that Mills's characterization does not allow us to sort the history of capitalism into cases that have violated liberal-democratic norms and cases that have not, cases of racial exploitation and cases of standard capitalist exploitation. Mills's characterization of racial exploitation does not pick out all the cases he wants it to, because it only really fits discrimination-like cases. If the distinction between racial exploitation and standard capitalist exploitation can't be maintained, then we need a new characterization of what racial justice requires. As Oliver C. Cox wrote, "The capitalist exploiter, being opportunistic and practical, will utilize any convenience to keep his labor and other resources freely exploitable. He will devise and employ race prejudice when that becomes convenient." 83 On this way of thinking, racism is a tool for making extraction and exploitation easier. Racializing processes that designate people as members of dominant or subordinate races-especially those processes that have created the distinction between 'white people' and everybody else-have continuously served to rationalize and justify exploitation. Nancy Fraser, a proponent of this kind of view, argues that political distinctions between "free, exploitable citizen-workers and dependent, expropriable subjects...[are] constitutive of capitalist society." 8 4 Some people, the exploited, work for wages; others, the expropriated, have their labor, land, and resources taken from them. She continues, "The subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits...[E]xpropriation works by confiscaling capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital's circuits of self-expansion." 8 5 The distinction between the citizen-workers who are the focus of classic Marxian analysis and the expropriable subjects, those whose resources and labor power are simply taken by force, often tracks racial lines. Fraser's suggestion is that that is no accident: capitalism makes use of and then re-entrenches status hierarchies, racial and otherwise, in order that those in the most degrading economic positions can come to be seen as belonging there. From this perspective, to demand a nonracial capitalism is to misunderstand what race is and what role it plays in capitalist accumulation. I now turn to that idea. On the Idea of a Non-Racial Capitalism I. Introduction Among historians, racial capitalism has become more common as a term for indicating that the history of capitalism is also a history of the production of racial hierarchy. 86 Histories and theories of capitalism have often begun with industrialization and wage labor in English cotton mills, treating the slave labor that produced the cotton as "pre-capitalist," a residue of prior modes of production. But enslaved human beings were just as much a part of an expanding global system of credit and production as those stationed at the other end of the commodity chain. So since very early in its expansion, capitalism has involved a racialized division of labor, and it has continually relied on the "elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of notions of racial difference." 8 Theorists of racial capitalism would insist that any attempt to analyze capitalism and racism separately is bound to mislead or obscure. In a similar vein, radical theorists and activists have often insisted that capitalism requires racism, or that capitalism is inevitably or inherently racist. Critical social theorists who have taken this idea seriously have sought explanations for racism, racial oppression, and racial ideology grounded in "the logic of capitalism," the features and dynamics that are definitive of or otherwise required by capitalism as a system. The underlying political claim is that the struggle for racial justice must be anticapitalist. In this paper I assess the goal of a nonracial capitalism. This is a goal that Charles Mills has held explicitly, and a goal that I take to be implicit in many forms of antiracism that are not anticapitalist. I first consider views according to which that goal is incoherent, because 86 The term is often attributed to Cedric Robinson's work Black laixism but, as Peter James Hudson describes, it comes from South African activists and intellectuals of the late 1970s and early 1980s. See Hudson, "Racial Capitalism and the Dark Proletariat." capitalism is necessarily racist. I am hesitant about this approach, because everything depends on what dynamics one treats as definitive of capitalism. Capitalism is a historical social system that has always coincided with racism and racialism. If one abstracts away from that history narrowly, using a minimal conception of capitalist dynamics, then one ends up with the idea that capitalism need not produce or require racism; if one abstracts away from that history more fully, for example by treating imperialism as a necessary dynamic or outcome of capitalism, then racism is more clearly a component of the system. One should be very cautious about distinguishing between capitalism "in theory" and capitalism as it has actually occurred in our world. The only material we have for the theory is the course that the one historical social system hastaken. So instead, I argue that we should think of the question of whether a nonracial capitalism is possible as a question about whether we could get from here to there. On that way of looking at it, it is a very strange goal. Labor relations and flows of capital for the past several centuries have produced a global economic core and a periphery, places of incredible material abundance and others of incredible material deprivation, and that dichotomy underpins a global racial hierarchy. It is impossible to imagine tearing down that hierarchy while leaving intact the basic structure of production. So it is not at all clear what a nonracial capitalism could look like, starting from where we are now. II. Mills's goal of a nonracial capitalism Charles Mills writes in "Racial Exploitation": Whereas Marx's famous claim is that capitalism needs to be abolished to achieve the end of class exploitation (since a capitalism that did not extract surplus value would liquidate itself), racial exploitation is at least in theory eliminable within a capitalist framework. That is, it is possible to have a non-racial capitalism, either because races do not exist as social entities within the system or because, though they do exist, there is no additional racial exploitation on top of class exploitation. Since we live in a post-Marxist world in which Marx's vision seems increasingly unrealizable, with no attractive "communist" models to point at, this conclusion is welcome because it implies that the struggle for racial justice need not be anticapitalist. One simple formulation of the political project would thus be the demand for a non-racial or a non-white-supremacist capitalism. (Representing white supremacy as a system in its own right, with its distinctive modes of exploitation, has the virtue of clarifying what the real target is.) However, I qualified the "eliminable" with "in theory." The counterargument that needs to be borne in mind is that while a non-racial capitalism could have developed in another world, the fact that the capitalism in our world has been so thoroughly racialized since its inception means that racial inequality has long been crucial to its reproduction as a particular kind of capitalist formation. Logical distinctions in theory between US capitalism and white supremacy are all very well, but their fusion in reality into the composite entity of white-supremacist capitalism makes any political project of attempting to separate the two a non-starter, in part because of the reciprocal imbrication of class and race, class being racialized and race being classed. I will not say anything more about this counterargument, but it should be noted as an important objection to the whole project. One characterization of what I am attempting to do here is to fill out the "important objection to the whole project." In this passage Mills gives two characterizations of what a nonracial capitalism might mean: one in which "races do not exist as social entities" or one in which "there is no additional racial exploitation on top of class exploitation." Mills does not give any explanation of what a capitalist world in which races do not exist as social entities would look like, and I have previously argued that Mills does not succeed in distinguishing racial exploitation from class exploitation. But Mills also treats "nonracial capitalism" and "non-white-supremacist" capitalism interchangeably, and in the second paragraph, he suggests that a nonracial capitalism would 88Mills, "Racial Exploitation," 126. preclude racial inequality. For now, we can proceed by allowing "nonracial capitalism" to serve as a placeholder for a capitalism in which there is neither racism understood as an ideology nor racism understood as the set of material structures that the ideology justifies. III. Capitalism "in theoty" A first response to Mills worth exploring is that a nonracial capitalism is not possible even "in theory." On this kind of view, a nonracial capitalism initially looks possible only because the picture of capitalism one begins with is impoverished. Racism is an ingredient necessary for keeping the system running, or is in some way a component of the mode of production itself. For example, consider these claims, familiar among radicals: • Capitalism requires imperial expansion, which requires or inevitably produces racism. • For capitalism to persist, workers must be prevented from seeing that they share material interests, so capitalists must stoke racial animosity. • Capitalist production necessarily creates a reserve army of labor. This produces a social need for an explanation for the reserve army's exclusion from formal employment, and attributing their exclusion to natural inferiority is most effective. To defend any of these suggestions, one would have to give a full picture of the social dynamics that produce the effect in question, and explain why capitalism necessarily involves these social dynamics-why, for example, there couldn't be a non-imperialist capitalism. Then one would have to do one of two things. First, one could argue that whatever the theory explains is sufficiently close to what we normally consider racism. Explanations that seem promising at first pass often identify a need, but it is generally not clear why it has to be racism that fills that need. For example, capitalists may need some way of dividing workers-but it is not clear why this requires racism in particular, when there are other means of dividing people. 56 The alternative is to argue for a redefinition of racism, according to which it just is whatever plays the particular function that has been identified-racism just is that set of beliefs that justifies imperialism, for example. But this seems to produce a successful explanation only by relying on an overly expansive conception of racism. In identifying racism with a particular function or a particular need that capitalism creates, one answers a slightly different question. One has argued not that capitalism requires racism, the actual phenomenon in our world, but just that it requires something that does what racism does. There are two reasons to be cautious about explanations of this form. First, each of them tries to provide a theory of racism that is in some way internal to the theory of capitalism. Everything depends on what characterization of capitalism one provides: what one treats as definitive and central, how one delimits the system from everything it interacts with, how much complexity one entertains. But there is not a context-independent characterization of capitalism. Different characterizations will be suited to different purposes. So whether one is able to explain capitalism in such a way that it seems to be inherently or necessarily racist depends on how maximal a conception of it one begins with. Second, these explanations are ahistorical: they identify timeless dynamics of capitalism and timeless roles for racism to play within it. But racism is not so uniform: "the conditions that sustain its advantageous expression are rarely permanent." 89 And capital is very flexible; there are few guarantees about what will be in the interests of particular capitalists at particular times and places. While there have been particular social relations at particular periods that have in some sense created a need for racism,9 0 how racism is expressed and to whose benefit varies. So trying to explain racism as playing a single role or as created by a single dynamic ignores its historically specific character. IV. Fraser's theory To explain some of these problems in more detail, I will examine the conception of capitalism and racism that Nancy Fraser provides in her APA Presidental Address, "Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?" Fraser begins by claiming that capitalism "has always been deeply entangled with racial oppression." She then sets out her topic as follows: What is the nature of this entanglement? Is it contingent or structural? Did the capitalism/racism nexus arise by chance, and could matters in principle have been otherwise? Or was capitalism primed from the get-go to divide populations by "race"? And what about today? Is racism hard-wired in the deep structure of contemporary capitalism? Or is a nonracial capitalism finally possible now, in the twenty-first century? 9 Fraser's answer is that there is a structural basis for racial oppression within capitalism. She locates it in capitalism's reliance on two distinct modes of accumulation, exploitation and expropriation, and their assignment to two different populations. But, she argues, the relationship between these two modes has varied across time, and in each phase, a "historically specific configuration of the two exes underpins a distinctive landscape of racialization." 92 For Marxists, capitalism necessarily involves exploitation: the seizure of surplus value from wage laborers. This seized value is absorbed into a cycle of accumulation that continuously to conceive of the masses as normal human beings and yet maintain their exploitative designs towards them." Cox, "Imperialism," 306. Walter Rodney argues, "Having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary torationalize that exploitation in racisttermsaswell."Rodney,HowEurope UnderdevelopedAfrica, 103. enriches the capitalist class but leaves the working class in the same position, with nothing to sell but their labor power. Fraser argues that this traditional Marxist picture leaves out a second form of capital accumulation. In addition to accumulation by exploitation, she argues, capitalism requires accumulation by expropriation. While wage laborers are exploited, those who perform "unfree, dependent, and unwaged labor" are expropriated. Expropriation also involves the seizure of a variety of resources and capacities: "land, animals, tools, mineral or energy deposits-but also human beings, their sexual and reproductive capacities, their children and bodily organs."" The concept of expropriation is similar to the concept of "primary accumulation," the accumulation that predated capitalism and created the capitalist class and the working class. But, Fraser argues, expropriation is ongoing, and "the commandeered capacities get incorporated into the valueexpanding process that defines capital." So expropriation is "confiscaion-cun-conscription-intoaccumulation." 94 The distinction between exploitation and expropriation as modes of capital accumulation corresponds to a distinction in political status: the distinction between free workers who are afforded the protections of citizenship and those who are designated "inherently violable," continually subject to further expropriation. In administering the institutions that distinguish "citizens from subjects, nationals from aliens, entitled workers from dependent scroungers," states identify some people as merely exploitable and others as expropriable. 9 9 3 Fraser, 26. 9 Fraser, 26-27. Fraser may overstate the difference between what she says and what Marx says. For example, throughout, Fraser emphasizes that debt is a primary mechanism ofexpropriation, but Marx writes, for example, "The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation," and "Along with the national debt there arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Fraser claims that this distinction-between two kinds of political subjects, who play different roles in circuits of capital accumulation-allows us to make sense of capitalism's relationship with racial oppression. She argues that expropriability, the condition of being deprived of political protection and continually subject to violation, "constitutes the core of racial oppression."96 In this way, Fraser claims, capitalism has a "noncontingent reliance on a stratum of unfree or subjugated people, racially marked as inherently violable." 97 While capitalism always requires both exploitation and expropriation, Fraser writes that in the past it also "required their mutual separation and assignment to two distinct populations, divided by the color line."9 8 In the present, though, which Fraser calls the era of financialized capitalism, the distinction between the populations subject to exploitation and those subject to expropriation is less sharp than it was in the past; financialized capitalism "subjects propertyless people of every hue to both exes simultaneously." 9 9 People everywhere are exploited as wage laborers, but they are also expropriated in virtue of being paid less than the socially necessary cost of reproduction and being forced into debt. So though Fraser's initial question is in terms of racism, she ends up trying to explain the relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. She argues that racial oppression has historically been required in the sense that (1) capitalism required expropriation; (2) it required that expropriation be assigned to a population distinct from the population that was exploited; and (3) this in turn required political orders that conferred the status of "expropriable" onto some people. I will quote the next claims directly: "It is expropriability, the condition of being defenseless and liable to violation, that constitutes the core (?f racial oppression. What distinguishesfree subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects qf expropriation is the mark of "race" as a sign of violability."0 0 There are important questions about the initial steps. First, quite a lot is shoved under the umbrella of "expropriation." It is not clear that the distinction Fraser points to is the most natural or important one. The process by which value is seized from women doing unpaid work in the home is very different from the process of enclosure or enslavement. Second, Fraser does not do enough to defend the claim that capitalism requires expropriation, nor enough to explain why exploited and expropriated populations had to be separated in the past. We know that this is in fact the broad-strokes story of European expansion, but Fraser does not make clear what it was about "capitalism"-rather than, say, the specific historical situation facing the European merchant class in the 1600s and the availability of labor-that required this separation. Most importantly for our purposes, Fraser's picture of race is unclear. At some points she argues that the distinction between exploitation and expropriation "correlates" with racial categories. If the relationship is merely one of correlation, then Fraser needs to explain why there is such a correlation; otherwise, she has merely given us the categories of exploitation and expropriation without explaining why particular groups are subject to particular modes of accumulation. That is, expropriability seems to be a category of oppression, but it is not clear what makes that oppression racial. The concern is analogous to one that has been raised against Marxists concerning gender oppression: Just as capital creates [social locations] indifferent to the individuals who fill them, the categories of marxist analysis, 'class,' 'reserve army of labor,' 'wage-laborer,' do not explain why particular people fill particular places. They give no clues about why women 61 10 Fraser, 30. Emphasis in original. are subordinate to men inside and outside the family and why it is not the other way around. Marxist categories, like capital itself, are sex-blind.'' Similarly, Fraser's categories of exploitation and expropriation do not explain why particular people fill particular places. The other possibility is that the distinction Fraser offers is itself supposed to explain the process of racialization. "The color line" between white people and people of color 0 2 marks the distinction between those subject to exploitation and those subject to expropriation, or the descendants of those groups. But this explains why there is a structural basis for racial oppression in capitalism only by relying on an overly broad and general characterization of what makes oppression racial. V. A Historically Situated Question We are ultimately interested in the question of capitalism's relationship with racism for political purposes. Given that fact, we should not interpret the question of a nonracial capitalism as one about whether in some other possible world a non-racial capitalism could have arisen, or whether any system that qualified as capitalist would also necessarily involve racism. Instead, we should think of it as a question about the future: whether we could get from here to there, and whether that is a worthy goal. To answer this question we should first seek to understand the way that capitalism is presently racialized. We need to examine, for example: Who composes the global owning class? 101 Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union," 7-8. 102 This is a term Fraser uses regularly. She also writes, "The contrast between dependency and freedom was sharpened and increasingly racialized, mapped onto two categorically different "races" of human beings. In this way, thefree white exploitable worker emerged as the antithetical flip side of its own abjected enabling condition: the dependent racialized expropriable subject. And modem racism found a durable anchor in the deep structure of capitalist society." So for her, the racial distinction to be theorized is white/nonwhite. Fraser, "Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?," 32. 62 Where is capital accumulating fastest? Where are new markets emerging, and who is positioned to capitalize on them? In what industries are profit margins highest, and where are the sources for the raw materials used in these industries? Where is labor cheapest? Where are the tax havens, and what global institutions protect them? Under whose control are the key canals likely to remain? What areas are going to become too hot or dry to live in, and what migration patterns will result? This set of questions refocuses our attention away from capitalism as an idealized economic system to the actual social system of production the word describes. In The Racial Contract, Mills writes: [T]he world is essentially dominated by white capital. Global figures on income and property ownership are, of course, broken down nationally rather than racially, but if a transnational racial disaggregation were to be done, it would reveal that whites control a percentage of the world's wealth grossly disproportionate to their numbers. ... It seems undeniable that for years to come, the planet will be white dominated... Economic structures have been set in place, causal processes established, whose outcome is to pump wealth from one side of the globe to another, and which will continue to work largely independently of the ill will/good will, racist/antiracist feelings of particular individuals.103 This is a good description of the material structures that reproduce the global racial hierarchy. Given this picture of the way the world is set up, what might a nonracial capitalism look like? This description suggests that getting to a nonracial capitalism would involve eliminating the structures that funnel value from some regions of the world to others. But these structures are not isolable components of the global economy. There are not a few key institutions one could alter to make the price of labor the same everywhere in the world, or to make the purchasing power of 63 1 °'Mills, The Racial Contract, 36. a dollar the same everywhere in the world. So it is very unclear what kind of global relations of production would merit the label "nonracial capitalism."