AT Racial Capitalism K - Michigan 7 2023 KLAB

AFF
2AC --- Cap = Antiracist
The neg is wrong – capitalism is the real anti-racist force
Ortiz 23 Alfredo Ortiz, President and CEO of Job Creators Network, January 19, 2023 “Want to be an antiracist? Be a capitalist” https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/be-antiracist-be-capitalist
Capitalism is the real, authentic 'anti-racist' force. Minority entrepreneurship can transcend America's racial and economic divides. As many Americans enjoy a short workweek due to Martin Luther King Day, it's worth reflecting on how Democrats and progressives ignore MLK's message to judge people not "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Their solution to overcome racial economic disparities is a racial spoils system that divides income, jobs, promotions, and college admissions based on skin color, the opposite of MLK's vision. Consider Democrats' broad support for race reparations, affirmative action, DEI benchmarks, and government programs and contracts that redistribute income based on race. A California government-sanctioned task force is currently devising the size and scope of reparations to be funneled to Black residents. President Biden even attacked car insurers for being racist on Monday, perhaps a prelude to more federal regulations. These racial redistribution schemes are downstream from "critical race theory," which teaches that U.S. societal institutions like the economy are structurally racist. "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination," argues leading proponent Ibram X. Kendi in his book "How to be an Antiracist." "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Rather than MLK's uniting message of racial progress that makes everyone better off, this neo-Marxist doctrine views society as a zero-sum competition among races. To the extent this worldview has been implemented by Democrats, it's led to pressure-group warfare and a deterioration of race relations. Ironically, this approach actually entrenches racial economic divides by impeding the greatest force for economic advancement that's ever existed: the free market. Capitalism is the true "antiracist" force because it rewards people based on hard work, ingenuity, and customer service rather than immutable characteristics like skin color. Doubling down on the free market is the best way to bridge racial economic gaps and achieve MLK's dream. As I argue in my new book, "The Real Race Revolutionaries: How Minority Entrepreneurship Can Overcome America's Racial and Economic Divides," increased minority entrepreneurship can achieve the racial economic equality we all seek. Data shows that minorities are disproportionately entrepreneurial and that minority entrepreneurs have already eliminated economic disparities, earning more than average White Americans. I was inspired to write this book after I came across a title in a local bookstore marketed to grade-schoolers called "Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution." The book's cover depicts two women of color, and its Amazon page describes it as "a playful introduction to trans identities," telling the story of "the transgender women of color who fought for LGBTQ+ equality." The moral of this story and so many others like it: Kids, especially minority kids, should pursue social activism and "revolution" to make the world a better place. I thought, "Why can't this book be Sylvia and Marsha Start a BUSINESS and feature a tale of entrepreneurship?" Starting a business is the real revolutionary act that minorities can take to empower themselves and their communities. Entrepreneurship can bring financial independence and hard-earned confidence. This is the empowering message that we should promote to kids and all minorities, not the soft bigotry that they are victims of structural racist forces. Democrats and progressives claim to be the intellectual descendants of MLK even while they pervert his message of racial blindness. They have staked out the moral high ground on racial issues, yet their activist message hasn't delivered. Meanwhile, the free-market small business economy is actually helping minorities reduce racial income equality through their own volition. Small businesses and their defenders are the ones who genuinely deserve moral authority on race issues. It's time we claim it.
2AC --- No Root Cause
Racial capitalism is a wrong theorization of capitalism; it fails to scale up and meaningfully influence state behavior.
Go 20 [Julian Go, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, December 24th, 2020, “Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism”, American Sociology Association, SAGE Journals, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0735275120979822?journalCode=stxa, Pages 40-44, JMH]
We can now turn to the three tensions in the racial capitalism literature, beginning with the issue of race. This is critical. If the term racial capitalism is to have implications for social theory, it must offer rigorously defined concepts constituting a transposable conceptual apparatus. Surely one of those concepts would have to do with “race.” But what exactly is “race”? The problem is that “race” is not typically defined in the existing literature, so it is unclear whether other categories marking difference, such as ethnicity, are more appropriate than race. Should we be thinking about “ethnic capitalism” rather than racial capitalism? Robinson’s (2000) work is a prime example. Nearly all scholars claim that one of Robinson’s key contributions is to show that capitalism was forged from precapitalist racial divisions in Europe. Capitalism is “racial,” according to Robinson, “because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society,” and capitalism was built upon that racialism (Kelley 2017; Táíwò and Bright 1996). The problem is that Robinson himself was not entirely clear that precapitalist social differences were actually “racial.” On one hand, he did use the term race in his analysis. “Racism,” Robinson (2000:2; see also pp. 26–27, 66–67) wrote, served to structure “the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” prior to capitalism, and capitalism seized on racism as it developed. On other hand, when discussing some of the presumably “racial” groups in feudal Europe, Robinson (2000:10–11) referred to linguistic rather than phenotypical differences, thus equating racial groups with linguistic groups. In fact, when discussing how migratory and immigrant labor formed the basis for the armies of the Absolutist states and for the production of value in early agrarian capitalism, he oscillated between calling them “races” and “ethnic” groups. For instance, Robinson (2000:23) used the phrase “ethnic divisions of sixteenth century immigrant labor,” and he referred to “national” differences when presumably speaking about premodern “racial” differences. Given these ambiguities, Robinson’s argument could be read differently from how it is conventionally taken. It is not that capitalism was built on prior racial differences; rather, capitalism served to racialize the preexisting ethnic division of labor, thereby turning religious, cultural, or linguistic differences into “racial” ones to legitimate its new exploitative tructure. In this view, racialization—the process of turning groups into biological entities called “races”—was a part of modern capitalism, not its precursor (cf. Omi and Winant 1986). In some passages, Robinson (2000) said this exactly: “the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones” (p. 26). Of course, whether “race” preexisted capitalism does not alter the larger argument of the racial capitalism approach, which is that racial differentiation and capitalism are mutually supportive. Still, the tension in Robinson’s work manifests the deeper issue of whether “racial” capitalism refers to race or other identities. This issue permeates Walzer’s (2020) recent criticism of the racial capitalism concept. Walzer points to examples such as Russia and China, where capitalism does not rely on racial differences but rather on ethnic and religious differentiation. “It may be that Muslims are among the most exploited workers in Russia,” he wrote, “but they are mostly Caucasian (some of them the original Caucasians), so we would have to talk about religious capitalism—where Orthodox Christians, not white people, are the privileged group.” On this basis, Walzer rejected the racial capitalism concept as limited at best and analytically debilitating at worse. Skeptics of Walzer have offered a rebuke: his argument misses the global dimensions of capitalism. At issue is not whether racial stratification articulates with capitalism within any single country but whether it permeates the world-capitalist system. Proponents of this argument could readily assemble evidence to show that, on a global scale, the vast majority of the world’s proletariat, subproletariat, and dispossessed—whether cultivating grapes or coffee on the farms of the Americas, cleaning up office floors in London, or making clothes in the sweatshops of New Delhi—are, to borrow DuBois’s (1935) phrase, “yellow, brown and black.” Against Walzer, this would retain the main claim of the racial capitalism approach that race and capitalism are intertwined. Yet this scaling upward of capitalism to a global level brings its own complications. It carries the danger of what Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) called “the cunning of imperialist [racialist] reason”: an analytic operation by which U.S.-centered scholars impose presumably U.S.-centric classifications (in this case, “race”) onto the rest of the world, thereby imposing racial classifications into contexts where they might not be operative. We would be obliged, for instance, to impose racial classifications onto Latin American contexts such as Brazil, where the salience of racial classifications is debatable (Loveman 1999; Wimmer 2015). In short, if we are to insist on the global character of racial capitalism, we must assume that analysts’ racial classifications are global as well. They may very well be, but racial capitalism’s founding texts, and more recent discussions, have not sufficiently problematized this tension.2 Can this tension be resolved? One way to do so is to raise the possibility that the racial capitalism concept works best for groups that have been undoubtedly racialized, such as members of the African diaspora in North America.3 Racial capitalism would thus refer mainly to the black ex-slave population, which has suffered some of the clearest and most virulent forms of racism. This might explain why the literature on racial capitalism has focused on African Americans and transatlantic slavery rather than other groups elsewhere in the world. Yet this seeming resolution would significantly reduce the scope of the racial capitalism concept. Racial capitalism would no longer depict a global system. Perhaps the best resolution is one that arrives through more reflexive research. We can explore how “race” is connected to capitalism in diverse sites and across historical periods, but we must be more conscious about whether we are referring to analysts’ definition of race or a category of practice. Put simply, we can arrive at a resolution only through careful research that more clearly defines “race. A second tension in the racial capitalism literature has to do with the relationship between this literature and existing social theories of capitalism, in particular, Marxian theories of capitalism. Animating the racial capitalism approach is the claim that Marxian theories of capitalism are inadequate because they obfuscate the racial foundations of capitalism. For Robinson (2000), “Western Marxism . . . has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications” (p. 317). Historians’ use of the racial capitalism approach is premised on the idea that Marxism does not adequately acknowledge slavery’s role in capitalism or the ongoing importance of colonialism and “primitive accumulation,” which Marx presumably relegated to the margins of his theory (Smallwood 2018). This is exactly why scholars in this tradition insist on the term racial capitalism: because Marxian theory fails to theorize race, we must add the qualifier race to the signifier capitalism. But what if Marxian theory does in fact take into account race, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, and proponents of the racial capitalism approach merely misread Marx? If so, the warrant, if not the entire premise, for Robinson’s and others’ work on racial capitalism would crater by an unfortunate misreading of Marxian theory. A number of scholars, in fact, already push against the notion that Marxist thought does not account for race, slavery, or colonialism. Drawing largely on Marx’s journalistic writings, they show that Marx not only discussed race, slavery, and colonialism but saw them as central for capitalism. According to this argument, Marx saw race as so crucial for capitalism that his theory saw the true proletariat as black, brown, and yellow—directly contrary to Robinson’s claim that Marxist theory only saw the white European proletariat as the true subject of history (Anderson 2010; Foster, Holleman, and Clark 2020; Ralph and Singhal 2019). If true, the racial capitalism literature is based on a “misguided reading of Marx” (Ralph and Singhal 2019:864). How might this apparent aporia in Marxian theory be resolved, if at all? It is imperative here to register a distinction between Marx’s theory of capital and his theory of capitalism. 4 The former is sketched in Marx’s mature social theory in Capital and related writings such as The Grundrisse (Postone 1996). These writings offer a formalized and abstract representation of the inner workings of capital, its accumulation, its contradictions, and its necessary demise through a series of central categories that capture the key elements of the capitalist system. At this level of abstraction, the main categories of the theory (e.g., “value,” “surplus value,” “concrete labor,” “abstract labor,” “capital,” “socially necessary labor time”) are devoid of any historical specificity or social content and as such can be applied to distinct historical phases or social formations (e.g., capitalism in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world or Russia in 1998, or the twenty-first-century global system). Categories of race, gender, or ethnicity are therefore not central, because they are too concrete. Alternatively, a theory of capitalism refers to capitalist development and dynamics in their empirical specificity. It is meant to explain and describe specific capitalist formations and developments as they really exist in the world, not their abstract conceptual form. This theory can be extracted from Marx’s journalistic writings and other essays, and it is here where issues such as slavery and ethnicity arise: the essays refer to real events and pressing issues in actually existing capitalism, such as the Civil War or the Irish question (Anderson 2010). But these observations or statements on concrete processes and relations such as slavery in actually existing capitalism—that is, Marx’s theory of capitalism—do not disturb or reconfigure his theory of capital, which remains focused on the relations of wage labor induced to a highly abstract level from his analysis of textile production. If and when he did discuss things such as slavery, such as in “The Working Day” section in Capital, he treated slavery as a passing phase or outside capital’s inner logic, a sort of heuristic to better apprehend and illuminate the latter (Marx [1867] 1906:328–30; on slavery as a heuristic, see Smallwood 2018). This distinction between Marx’s theory of capitalism and his theory of capital helps us better approach the debate generated by the racial capitalism literature. When Robinson or other proponents of the racial capitalism idea critique Marx’s theory for eliding or deliberately occluding race, slavery, and colonialism, they are critiquing his theory of capital, not his theory of capitalism. Here proponents of the racial capitalism approach are on solid ground. Marx’s theory of capitalism does take into account race, slavery, and colonialism, but his theory of capital renders these things marginal at best.5 Hence the warrant for the racial capitalism approach: because Marx’s theory of capital does not center race, the racial capitalism concept and the research and theorizing that go under its banner can fill the void. The concept may provide the basis for an alternative theory not only of racial capitalism but also of racialized capital. The final tension within racial capitalism is whether the interconnectedness of racial difference and capitalism is a logical or contingent necessity.6 If, as the racial capitalism literature suggests, slavery and its associated logics of racism have been crucial for the development of capitalism, and if global capitalism today remains intertwined with racial stratification, to what extent are these relations intrinsic to capitalism or accidental? Put differently, is capitalism necessarily racist (Fraser 2019; Lemann 2020)?7 For some, the relationship is only contingent. Walzer (2020) argued that in some countries, capitalism proceeds along just fine without racial difference, and if there is racial difference on a global scale, it is historically contingent. Although the vast majority of workers are nonwhite, Walzer suggested that this is not due to any intrinsic logic of capitalism but rather the accident of demographics (because most of the world is nonwhite, the majority of the world’s workers will be nonwhite). For this reason, Walzer suggested we disavow the racial capitalism concept. Alternatively, others claim that racism is indeed intrinsic to capitalism.8 There are two versions of this claim. One is that racism is necessary to divide the working class and legitimate the rule of the bourgeoisie. Racism is an ideological necessity of capitalism, justifying its unequal relations (Camp, Heatherton, and Karuka 2019; McCarthy 2016; Taylor 2016). “Capitalism requires inequality,” suggested Gilmore (2015), “and racism enshrines it.” A very different version, coming most predominantly from Fraser (2019), is that capitalism necessarily entails relations of exploitation and expropriation that feed off each other. Exploitation is the extraction of value from “free subjects” through wage labor. But expropriation, which includes slavery and colonialism, extracts value from racialized “dependent subjects” and is what enables exploitation to happen in the first place. Expropriation is “a necessary background condition for the exploitation of ‘workers’” (Fraser 2019) and therefore for capitalism itself. Capitalism is thus logically dependent upon racism.9 So what is the answer? Again, it helps differentiate between a theory of capital and a theory of capitalism. A theory of capitalism might demonstrate that race has been historically necessary for capitalist accumulation by reference to empirical reality: historically, capitalism and race have always been intertwined. But the claim that race is a logical necessity to capitalism would have to derive from a theory of capital, not from empirics alone. One would have to deduce, from the categories of Marx’s theory, the necessity of racism or racial differentiation in society. On this score, the arguments for the logical necessity of capitalism’s entanglements with race fall short. Consider the argument that racism is necessary for capitalism because capitalism requires racist ideology to divide the working class. This is a functionalist argument that is not functionalist enough, for

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