Reproducing Racial Domination: Expropriation, the Great Recession, and Covid-19 (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Political Theories of Reproduction

Abstract

This paper connects key political-economic mechanisms that reproduce racial domination in the neoliberal era to the longer history of racial capitalism. A number of scholars have detailed essential features of neoliberal capitalism from the relentless privatization of public and social services, to the spectacular growth of financialization, to obscene disparities in income and wealth. Yet, less attention has been paid to how neoliberalism builds on sedimented forms of expropriation inherent to American racial capitalism. Drawing on theories of capitalist reproduction and the durability of racial domination, I examine how neoliberal logics of “financial expropriation” regenerate, expand, and generalize modes of racialized and colonial expropriation.

In the first half of my paper, I turn to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008, showing how contemporary financial practices work through anti-Black and settler colonial techniques of wealth extraction and land dispossession. I argue that neoliberalism is distinguished from prior iterations of capitalism in terms of the dominance of finance. However, the “rise of financialization” under neoliberalism does not take place on a tabula rasa. I contend that fully grasping the financial crisis of 2007-2008, including its racialized nature and effects, requires attending to the predatory financial inclusion of formerly redlined, predominantly Black populations. Simultaneously, it also requires attending to the ways mortgage foreclosure was a novel financial innovation emerging in colonial America as a means for colonists to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land. The highly discrepant effects of neoliberalism on Black and Indigenous populations thus only make sense when we develop an analysis of capitalist reproduction within this larger context of anti-Black domination and settler conquest. More pointedly, we need to ask how anti-Black domination and settler notions of property constitute contemporary regimes of financialization.

In the second section of my paper, I examine the reproduction of capital during the Covid-19. Specifically, I look at the exponential generation of wealth amidst widespread immiseration and death. Financialization has enabled U.S. billionaires to grow their collective net worth by $931 billion largely due to a booming stock market. Through this example, I demonstrate that the reproduction of capital under neoliberalism requires the financial industry to control how poor, working-class, and racialized populations access basic services such as healthcare, education, housing, and retirement savings. Through my earlier analysis that combines racial, colonial, and financial expropriation, I contextualize Covid-19’s uneven racialized impact as an effect of American racial capitalism.

The paper concludes by cautioning against generalized claims of vulnerability and precarity under neoliberalism. I argue that, while formerly shielded white populations, including the middle and working classes, are increasingly made precarious through the financialization of everyday life, so too are racialized and colonized populations at disproportionate rates. These forms of racial domination structure and continue to be reproduced in the contemporary era, even as the population at large is more vulnerable to financialization. Finally, I suggest how these insights can inform political theories of capitalist reproduction and neoliberalism more broadly.

Author

• Siddhant Issar, University of Virginia