Jeff Goodwin
Marxists did develop this term, but let me begin by saying that a lot of ink has been wasted in an effort to define this phrase. None of the great Black Marxists from whom we’ve learned so much ever used this phrase — not Du Bois or James, not Cox or Fanon, not Rodney or Hall, not Nkrumah or Cabral. So it’s obviously possible to talk, and to talk insightfully, about race and class and capitalism and oppression without using this term. Simply putting together the words “racial” and “capitalism” does not magically guarantee that you understand the relationship between capitalism and racism. Of course, I’m hardly the first person to point this out.
That said, the phrase “racial capitalism” was in fact first developed by Marxists in South Africa, during the apartheid era. A couple sociologists, Marcel Paret and Zach Levenson, have shown that the phrase was apparently first used by a white Berkeley professor, Bob Blauner, in 1972. But few people picked up on it until the term was widely used by South African Marxists, including Neville Alexander, Martin Legassick, and Bernard Magubane, during the late 1970s and 1980s. Their point was that because capitalism was the foundation of racial oppression in South Africa, the anti-apartheid struggle needed to be anti-capitalist as well as a struggle for democratic rights.
This was in opposition to the standpoint of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) and South Africa’s Communist Party. They argued that the struggle for socialism should be postponed until after a democratic revolution — a “national democratic revolution,” as they called it — overthrew apartheid. But this implies, implausibly, that apartheid had little or nothing to do with capitalism and the exploitation of black workers. In fact, the ANC did more than postpone the struggle for socialism —…
Auteur: Jeff Goodwin
