Racial capitalism is the root cause of Islamophobia making interrogating it a prerequisite

232 Bridging the gap: insights from racial capitalism The scholarship on racial capitalism can provide insights into how Islamophobia and austerity intersect. Racial capitalism is rooted in traditions of black radical thought. This includes the work of sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox (e.g. Cox 1964), whose understanding of capitalism as a world system predates Wallerstein’s (1974) canonical contribution. It also influenced the more recognised and frequently-cited Cedric J. Robinson, author of Black Marxism (1983). Dissatisfied with orthodox Marxist accounts of the emergence of capitalism – conceived as an endogenous process centred on a territorially bounded set of European nations – Robinson (drawing on Cox) draws attention to two interrelated points (Robinson 2019, 79): that “race” and racism were central to the development of capitalism, and that capitalism itself was to be understood as a world system fundamentally enmeshed in and shaped by global processes. This scholarship connected global (imperial and colonial) histories of slavery, genocide and dispossession, to the production of contemporary racial hierarchies between states, and hierarchies of racialized populations within states. The lens of racial capitalism offers a way of historicising the global links between “race”, class, and gender relations in the formation of contemporary states. Processes of racialisation and gendering are central to the work of organising populations, dividing forms of labour (recognised as “work” and “non-work”), and attributing value to that labour (Bhattacharyya 2018, ix). The resulting racial and gendered hierarchies of life produced through this intersection of capitalism, “race” and gender, ensure that exploitation and dispossession are experienced predominantly by those parts of the population deemed expendable. This point can be briefly illustrated through El-Enany’s analysis of the fire at Grenfell Tower (2017). Residents of Grenfell were formed of an international working class, who came to be resident in Britain through histories of colonialism. Working class populations racialised as “non-white” are disproportionately confined to the higher floors of unsafe high-rise buildings, reflecting a “colonial logic of space” and exposing them to “premature and violent deaths” (El-Enany 2017). El-Enany considers the inescapability of the “colonial condition” through the case of Mohammad Alhajali, a 23 year-old Syrian refugee, who escaped a conflict zone only to perish in Grenfell. The case illustrates Danewid’s view regarding the underexplored connections between the treatment of marginalised populations in the Global South and Global North, through 232 practices of urban planning and racialised policing. London, São Paulo and Cape Town are global cities which are historic and ongoing “imperial terrains” (Danewid 2019, 292). As Robinson put it after a 1962 trip to what was then Southern Rhodesia, in present-day Zimbabwe: “Will the U.N. understand the pleas of the Blacks in the townships […], where most often three to four families must stay in one room the size of your kitchen […] of the tens of thousands unemployed because they are not educated, uneducated because they are unemployed, both because they are black? Africa understands, Asia understands, you and I and the millions of blacks in the U.S., Brazil and the West Indies understand, not because we are black or brown but because we have lived it and are living it now” (Robinson 2019, xv). These insights allow a rethink of the relationship between Islamophobia and austerity. Recognising the constitutive role of “race” and gender in capitalist reproduction, and in the construction of hierarchies of lives which are more or less disposable, we can explore how Islamophobia is implicated in the austerity-afflicted political economy of Britain. The next section provides an overview of the place of Muslim populations in Britain’s post/imperial history of raced, classed and gendered relations, to help make sense of how Islamophobia has become key to austerity