Racialized Capitalism?

Round Table with Nancy Fraser (Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research), Manuela Bojadžijev (professor at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin) and Bafta Sarbo (activist on the board of the initiative "Black People in Germany"), hosted by Robin Celikates.
In his 1983 classic Black Marxism Cedric J. Robinson employed the term “racial capitalism” to insist that, as a matter of historical fact, industrial capitalism was built on the basis of colonialism and slavery, and that, as a matter of sociological fact, capitalist accumulation continues to operate through racial differentiation and hierarchization. In recent years, “racial capitalism” has attracted not only sustained theoretical attention, but it has also become an important reference point for radical social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives. It is not difficult to see why: race (just like gender) structures who can access jobs, wages, housing, credit, mobility across borders and other social goods; and being subjected to austerity, police violence, imprisonment, environmental hazards and health risks is in fundamental ways inflected by racism.
In this panel discussed some of the central issues the turn to “racial capitalism” raises: If capitalism is necessarily racist, what makes it so? If race and gender are not accidental to, but constitutive of capitalism, how can the relation between class, race and gender be conceptualized in ways that also track their realignment in the current constellation? If, in the framework of racial capitalism, race is not primarily an identity but a structure of power, how does this impact our analysis both of capitalism and the movements that struggle against oppression and exploitation? And if the universal proletariat can no longer serve as the subject of revolutionary emancipation, what is the horizon for anti-capitalist struggles and transversal forms of solidarity today?