Racial capitalism, uneven development, and the abstractive powers of race and money

Abstract

How does the circulation of capital in the form of money and finance mobilize different constructions of “Blackness” across historical-geographical contexts, and how does this produce uneven development? This contribution offers theoretical and methodological provocations to think about this question, drawing on two cases of raced finance: race-based bank lending in the United States, and international investment to sub-Saharan countries. I argue that the impersonal character of social domination under capitalism, expressed in and by the movement of abstract categories (such as the commodity, value, money, the state) requires that we carefully mobilize the notion of abstraction in theorizing the co-production of racialized difference and uneven development. I develop this conceptual argument by way of a sympathetic yet critical engagement with recent scholarship on racial capitalism, and by bringing the critique of political economy into conversation with the Black radical tradition. The key question is not the extent to which cases of raced finance exhibit a paradigmatic “anti-Blackness.” Rather, it is about how the abstractive powers of race and the social forms of capital refract each other in violent configurations, and contribute to giving the capitalist production of space a raced imprint. The co-production of racialized and spatial difference thus enhances processes of capitalist discipline and extraction mediated by money, while the totalizing operations of money reproduce racialized power relations and uneven development. I then turn to the work of Bhandar and Toscano to reflect methodologically on how to mobilize various levels and modalities of abstraction in concrete research.

Digital Experiments with Landed Property: Robots, Race, and Rent

“…First, I suggest that geographic analyses of digitization and property attend to who and what maintain and acquire power as technical arrangements of claiming, valuing, and extracting rent from land shift. As this article has shown, racialized difference is already within, and shapes the operation of foundational capitalist categories (Alami 2023), such as property and technology. Contending with how racial regimes of property mutate through digitization is therefore a priority for scholarship within economic geography, digital geography, and political economy.…”

Maps, Apps and Race: The Market as a Theoretical Machine

“…Think of the Black tenant deprived of property rights and segregated in the Black township; and think now of the racialized tenant, calculated and placed into the landlord's portfolio via platformed-mediated tenancy. Through the collection and aggregation of personal, financial, biographical and spatial data, technology might dissolve race into seemingly colour-blind categories, but this digital remediation of the market re-enacts the power of abstraction in the production of racialized differentiation (Alami 2023). As part of this fourth conceptual moment, Desiree Fields leverages, like others did before, the housing market into a theoretical machine, but this time to conceptualise racial capitalism and rentier capitalism, and how the two intersects through digital experiments in housing.…”