Racial capitalism guarantees endless exploitation and violence

V. CO N C LU S I O N ‘Racial capitalism’ as an analytic presents a fundamental challenge for international economic law because the latter is fundamentally linked to racial capitalism understood as a material structure. The interlinking of race and capitalist accumulation or, more accurately, the making of race as a tool for capitalist accumulation are old and entrenched, but its reproduction is not smooth or automatic. It depends both on spectacular acts of violence, such as those taking place at the borders of rich states, and on a multitude of dispersed, yet inter-connected, acts of governance, decision-making, and sorting that are no less violent and exploitative simply because they are mundane. When referring to ‘violence’ here, I do not engage with concepts of ‘slow’ or ‘structural’ violence, useful as they may be in other contexts.99 Rather, I have in mind fairly conventional conceptions of violence: injured bodies, death, and physical inability to access certain parts of the earth. This type of violence in particular is considered alien to international investment law, or, rather, the two have been conceptualized as antithetical: international investment law is a peaceful way of resolving economic disputes and, even more so, it is a means of disciplining the violent impulses of the (Southern) state. As this paper has shown, this is patently incorrect. Full protection and security is a standard that calls forth a violent, repressive state, provided that this violence is directed against specific groups of people and seeks to maintain the conditions of enrichment of other groups of people. Some would say that these two groups are racialized people on the one hand and white people on the other. Others will retort that the two groups are really the working class and peasantry on the one hand and the capitalist class on the other. The political and jurisprudential contribution of ‘racial capitalism’ as an analytic is to say that this is a false dichotomy.