Katzenstein, Preliminary Literature Review, 29.09.2016 Race and Capitalism

Katzenstein, Preliminary Literature Review, 29.09.2016 Race and Capitalism

Table of Contents

1. Preliminary Notes

2. History

3. Economics

4. Sociology

5. Political Science

1. Introductory Remarks

This is a brief overview of the social science literature relating to the intersection of race and capitalism broadly construed, with a focus on recent US scholarship. The relevant literature is discussed by discipline. This sometimes leads to a fragmentation of interdisciplinary debates. Wherever possible, I have indicated overlaps between the terminology and debates of different disciplinary traditions.[1] Given the breadth of the issues under discussion, it might not come as a surprise that this literature review is a far cry from comprehensive—some of the most glaring omissions include the intersectionality literature and some of the classic black Marxist approaches to race and capitalism. The sociology section in particular should be read as a preliminary sketch rather than an exhaustive depiction of the debate.In spite its weaknesses, I hope that this literature reviewwill serve as a useful starting point for a concerted effort to develop a more exhaustive overview of the relevant literature. Any and all suggestions for changes and additions are most welcome and can be send to .

2. History

The recent upsurge of interest in the history of capitalism in History departments across the US emphasises the central role slavery played in the development of American capitalism. This renewed focus on the role of racial exploitation for capitalist development continues, in many ways, earlier debates amongst historians regarding the role of slavery in American economic development. Earlier debates had focused on whether the pre-abolition slave-based economies in the US South could be considered capitalist. Behind this seemingly inauspicious definitional question lurked more fundamental questions about the centrality of slavery for the economic development of the US and US history more generally. What was at stake was whether slavery and racial exploitation should be seen as an archaic remnant of the past, which was in tension with the development of a capitalist economy, or as a central and characteristic feature of US economic development. Eugene Genovese and Douglas Egerton both stressed the non-capitalist aspects of the Southern society and economy. Eugene Genovese famously argued that the South was characterised by a paternalist culture that rejected the market as an arbiter of social relations (Fox-Genovese 1988; Genovese 1969, 1976; J. R. Young 1999). In a similar vein,Douglas Egerton argued that the economies of the South had not undergone a market revolution and could therefore not be considered capitalist (Egerton 1996). In contrast to this, James Oakes, Stanley Engerman and Robert W. Fogel emphasised the capitalist aspects of the Southern economy and stressed the continuities between the Northern and Southern economies, such as the centrality of liberal private property for the slaveholding regime (Fogel 1995; Oakes 1998; Woodman 1999).

Contemporary debates about the role of slavery in capitalist development could therefore be considered a mere continuation of these older debates—a “capitalist moment” in the historiography of the Southern economy. It is certainly true that current scholarship largely emphasises the capitalist aspects of the Southern economy in general and the compatibility and centrality of slavery and the domestic slave trade with and for capitalist development in the South (W. Johnson 2009). However, there is also a more fundamental shift in the literature—away from a focus on the Southern economy as an isolated phenomenon inglobal and US history. Instead, scholars increasingly adopt a more holistic perspective and stress the importance of slave-based economies and the transatlantic slave trade for capitalist development within the US and across the globe (Baptist 2014; Beckert 2014b; Rockman 2006; Schermerhorn and Schermerhorn 2015). For the former, see for example (Farrow et al. 2005; Schermerhorn and Schermerhorn 2015), for the latter refer to (Blackburn 1998; Tomich 2003; van der Linden 2008). The analyses of the role of slavery in the economic development of the US cover a wide range of different aspects, including the role of slavery in commerce and as commerce (Deyle 2005; W. Johnson 2008), the emergence of financial markets and financial products (Baptist 2010; Boodry 2014; Kilbourne 1995, 2006; Martin 2010), scientific management (Commons 1920; Esch and Roediger 2009; Rosenthal 2013b, 2013a, 2016 (forthcoming)), wage labour and commodification (Baptist 2001; Stanley 1998; Waldstreicher 2004)and various industries, such as sugar, cotton, tobacco (R. Bailey 1990; Beckert 2004, 2014b; Boodry 2014). In short, it illustrates, as Sven Becker has put it, “the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and centre”[2]and continues an interrupted and marginalised tradition of historical inquiry into the role of slavery in capitalist development (Cox 1964; Greene 1942; Mannix and Cowley 1963; E. E. Williams 1944).

One other strand of the literature that seems relevant to the “problem space” of slavery and capitalist development is the long-standing debate about the relationship between racial hierarchies, race-thinking and the gradual institutionalisation of slavery in the early days of the British colonies in North America. This debate, which has been re-heated several times over the past decades, largely revolves around the question of whether slavery preceded or was partially motivatedby pre-existing European conceptions of race and racial hierarchies. The debate is, for the most part, caught between two diametrically opposed poles: those who claim that race-thinking and racism preceded and contributed to the institutionalization of slavery, and those who claim that racism and conceptions of race are by-products of slavery. For those who argue—with wildly differing degrees of sophistication—that racism preceded slavery, see (Degler 1959; Jordan 1972, 1974, 2012; Ruchames 1969; Soderlund 2000; Wood 1997, 2005; D. R. Wright 1990). For those who argue that racism did not precede slavery, see (T. Allen 1994a; Fields 1990; Handlin et al. 1960; Handlin and Handlin 1972; Tomlins 2010) Some recent work has tried to overcome the chasm by arguing that race thinking and racial prejudice was both a cause and an effect of the establishment of slavery—i.e. that it existed both prior to and was strengthened due to the establishment of slavery (Wood 2005).

In comparison to the literature on the centrality of slavery to capitalism, there are considerably fewer historical treatments that deal primarily with the intersection of race and capitalism after the Civil War. However, even if race is not the main focus of the analysis,a number of works that trace the complex co-evolution of governance, legislation, capitalist development and the racial order make important contributions to the understanding of racial economic disparities, their origins, development and impact. There are three clusters of inquiry that seem particularly prominent, namely (a) the question of spatial segregation and its relation to the reproduction of unequal economic power, (b) the relation between racial dimensions of credit, debt andfinancialisation and (c) the emergence of a new, specifically Southern mode of capitalist enterprise after the Second World War.[3] With regards to questions of how spatial segregation is implicated in the reproduction of unequal economic power and the ways in which it functions as a tool for rent extraction and preserving white economic power, see (Connolly 2014; Gotham 2002; Kruse 2013; Satter 2009). In A World More Concrete, Connolly analyses the relationship between the colour line and capitalism in Jim Crow South Florida. He argues that the colour line proved highly profitable—both because it made certain populations vulnerable to super-exploitation (landlords could charge exorbitant rents in ghettos, for example) and because it largely prevented African American property ownership—initially through violence and later through more “civilized” measures, such as eminent domainexpropriations and neighbourhood redevelopment programs that entailed the displacement of residents—thus reproducing a racialised distribution of wealth. Connollyargues that both black elites and the black poor were implicated in maintaining the system of white supremacy insofar as they aspired toproperty ownership as a form of individual or racial uplift—an aspiration that encouraged individual solutions and did not challenge the underlying structures of white power, according to Connolly. Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, on the other hand, shows how white flight undermined the aims of the Civil Rights Movement. White flight, Kruse argues, was a bottom-up movement that sought to resists the Civil Rights Movement’s demands for integration and responded with the flight of people, capital and industry. Lewinnek likewise stresses the racial dimension of suburbanization and emphasises the way in which suburban living was framed as the white working man’s reward (Lewinnek 2014), while Hirsch and Sugrue trace how segregated housing and resistance to integrated neighbourhoods have shaped current patterns of racialized poverty in de-industrialised cities (Hirsch 1998; Sugrue 2014).

(b) The financialisation of the US industry has received much attention in the context of recent neoliberal restructurings of the economy. Julia Ott, Louis Hyman and Jonathan Levy provide historical accounts of the rise of the role of credit and debt in the US economy and the evolution of the financial system. While race isn’t the primary focus of theirwork, all of them analyse the racial inflections of the emerging financial markets and the ‘debt economy’. In When Wall Street Met Main Street Julia Ott analyses how stock market investment came to be seen as a mass practice that provided individuals with a stake in the national economy. She provides an account of how this shaped both US American capitalism and conceptions of citizenship(Ott 2011). Ottaddresses the racial aspect of the changing role of the financial markets most explicitly with regards to wartime government bonds, so-called Liberty Loans. She argues that African Americans and recent immigrants saw Liberty Loans as a way to claim full citizenship rights.[4]Local business elites, she argues, resisted the expansion of the financial markets, worried that new ownership structures might undermine existing social hierarchies (Ott 2011). In Debtor Nation, Louis Hyman traces the growing importance of credit in the US economy, especially with regards to consumption(Hyman 2011). He argues that even as credit became a defining feature of full American citizenship and a basic prerequisite for economic participation,racialised minorities remained largely excluded from access to credit. Legislative efforts to change discriminatory and exploitative credit relationsdid little to ameliorate the situation, however, since it did not address underlying racial disparities in wealth, income and job prospects which determinedcreditworthiness.[5]Levy’s Freaks of Fortune is likewise preoccupied with the emergence of financial markets and instruments(J. Levy 2012). One of Levy’s central theses is that the commodification of risk, which came to full fruition in the beginning of the mid 19th century, brought about a significant shift in the conception of personal freedom. Freedom was now thought to entail the ownership of one’s own risk, which had previously been structured by hierarchical relations. He traces the development of the notion of alienable and commodifiable risk back to long-distance trade in general, and to the Atlantic slave trade in particular. He makes two key arguments about the relation between slavery, commodified risk and new conceptions of personhood and freedom: (1) the transatlantic slave trade would have been impracticable without risk management, and hence without the commodification of risk; (2) various legal decisions on the liability of insurers in the case of slave mutinies shaped the conception of freedom as the ownership of one’s risk. According to Levy, legal decisions redefined slavery as somebody else owning the risk of one’s life; while defining freedom as owning one’s own risk. Peter Hudson, finally, draws yet another connection between the expansion of financial markets and racial orders. Hudson argues that the financial interests of New York investment banks in the Caribbean were articulated and legitimated through ideas of race. Investment banks directly contributed to a discourse of financial paternalism in which financial control was constructed as a benevolent and constructive intervention into the affairs of a backward and childlike people (Hudson 2013: 94)

(c) In the post Second World War era, two shifts in the economic landscape of the US seem particularly relevant to the nexus of race and capitalism: firstly, the defeat of labour in the South (see next section on labour history) and secondly, the emergence of a new form of capitalist enterprise—low-waged, non-unionized and state-supported (which, some have argued, became the basis for globalising capitalist enterprise)(Frederickson 2011). In Serving God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moretonoffers an exemplary account of this story by analysing the history ofWal-Mart’s success(Moreton 2009). Moreton identifies a number of ways in which the rise of populist corporatism in general, and Wal-Mart in particular, shaped and was shaped by the racial order.Firstly, corporations that were largely owned by white elites profited in multiple ways from government support: federal loans subsidized private enterprise without imposing regulatory control, the Cold War defence industry redistributed national wealth to the South and West and federal investment enabled rising mass consumption. In other words, this new type of Southern corporation profited from a type of “white affirmative action”, to use Katznelson’s terminology (Katznelson 2005).Moreover, Moreton argues that Wal-Mart’s success waspartially built on the weakening of labour and the civil rights movement in the South, which itself was in part a result of black disenfranchisement. The success of Wal-Mar was also linked to the racial order in less obvious ways: for example, Wal-Martself-consciously cultivateda populist image. While populism had initially been directed against large corporations and chains, Wal-Mart capitalized on the underlying antipathies towards foreign capital, including their racial and anti-semitic undertones, and managed to present itself as a locally financed and locally owned corporation. Wal-Mart became a repository of the national imagination: a remnant of an imagined and romanticized American past populated exclusively by white, thrifty, hard-working yeomen. Finally, Moretonargues, Wal-Mart’s self-image and its predilection for a rural white work-force shaped notions of “reliable” labour more generally—thus linking Wal-Mart’s success and self-imagination to a perpetuation and reinforcement of a racialization of the labour force.

Recent Additions

1. (Zimmerman 2010)

2.2 Labour History

Since the literature of race and labour history is quite extensive, I have organized the discussion into different subsections. The first section deals with a general overview of the literature on race and organized labour, the second provides a brief chronological sketch of the literature on race and labour more generally (rather than focusing primarily on organized labour), the third focuses on gender, race and labour and the fourth and final section briefly discusses the history of labour legislation and race.[6]

2.2.1 Organised Labour and Race

There is a large body of literature that deals with the history of labour, and especially of organised labour in the United States. While labour history has traditionally not been very concerned with question of race, there is a growing body of work that seeks to understand the complex role that race has played in relation to the working class and organised labour.

For a good overview of the history of black labour and its complex relation to organized labour in the US, see (Arnesen 2007; Foner 1976; William H Harris 1982; Jones 1998; Zieger 2007) and Spero and Harris’ classic The Black Worker(S. D. Spero and Harris 1968). For general accounts of 20th century labour history that emphasise the role of black workers, see (N. Lichtenstein 2013; Zieger and Gall 2002). (Foner 1975; Foner 1978; Taft 1957) provide a general introduction to the racial politics of US American trade unions. As is well known, US trade unions have a rather dismal track record with regards to the treatment of African American workers. A rough sketch of the racial politics of various union associations would range from the Railroad Brotherhoods, which pursued an unabashedly exclusionary policy for most of their history (Arnesen 1994, 2001b)[7], over the lukewarm and often hypocritical egalitarianism of the National Labour Union (1866-1874)[8] and the American Federation of Labor (1886-1955)[9] (Mandel 1955; Myrdal 1944; Taft 1957) to the more explicit but often troubled egalitarianism of the Knights of Labor (1869-1893)[10](Fink 1978; Gerteis 2007; Hild 2007; Kann 1977; Kessler 1952; McLaurin 1978), the International Workers of the World (1905-1924)[11](Foner 1970) and the Congress of Industrial Organisation (1935-55) (Goldfield 1993; Goldfield et al. 1995; N. Lichtenstein 2003; Zieger 1997).

Despite the strained relationship between organized labour and African American workers, interracial organising was not uncommon. Examples include the interracial organising of waterfront workers in New Orleans between 1892 and 1923(Rosenberg 1988)(Arnesen 1991), biracial organising in coal mining (Gutman 1968; H. Hill 1988; Kelly 2001; Letwin 1998; A. Lichtenstein 1995), interracial cooperation in the steel and auto industry between 1927 and 1941, biracial organising in the cotton fields of western Texas and eastern Alabama in 1934 as well as in the cannery industry in California between 1920-40s (Ruiz 1987) and in Chicago’s meatpacking industry in the 1930s. However, as many commentators stress, interracial labour organizing was often quite limited in its goals. Strategic cooperation usually did not extend to a political commitment to the social equality of African Americans, and white workers insisted on maintaining racially segregated social lives (Arnesen 1991; Boyle 1995, 1997; Gutman 1968; A. Lichtenstein 1995; Zieger 2007). As a counterpoint to this depressing trend, Garcia’s analysis of labour politics in the citrus growing regions of the eastern Los Angeles County stresses how social interaction laid the groundwork for racially integrated labour struggles (García 2001).

Despite occasional instances of interracial organising, the underlying tensions between white, African American, Chinese and Hispanic workers were often more tangible than any prospects for a genuine unity of the working class. While most of the literature seems focused on analysing the relations between white and African American workers, there is also a substantial literature on the strained relations between organized labour and Asian Americans (Cheng and Bonacich 1984; Gyory 1998a; Saxton 1971, 1990). Non-white workers were often perceived to undermine the gains of the white working class. This was especially true with regards to African Americans and gave rise to the trope of African Americans as strike-breakers (Arnesen 2003; Whatley 1993). Labour related tensionssometimes erupted into out and out violence (McLaughlin 2002; Rudwick 1964; Tuttle 1970). For debates amongst labour historians about general patterns regarding the relationship between African American and white workers, see (H. Hill 1984)(Arnesen 1993, 1998, 2001a; Goldfield 1993; Goldfield et al. 1995; H. Hill 1988, 1996; A. Lichtenstein 1995; G. Peck 2004).