In recent years, the inseparable procedures of racialization and capitalism have been magnified in the public eye. Scholarship has moved alongside debt crises and the ongoing profitability of punishment, and taken clues from social movements that have dramatized the connections between the dynamics of race, finance, extraction, selective success and economic immiseration. In this conversation we ask, what are some of the important hermeneutics used to understand and critique the intertwined processes of race and capital? What can two of the more powerful left-leaning critiques, the Movement for Black Lives and Modern Monetary Theory, learn from the other? Of what use is the concept of racial capitalism to both movements?
Panelists
Raul Carrillo
The Next Economy Project & Modern Money Network
Destin Jenkins
Assistant Professor of History, Univeristy of Chicago
Visiting Scholar at Heilbroner Center, 2019-20
Ryan Jobson
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Further readings
The panelists also shared a few suggested readings related to their discussions at the panel:
Raúl Carillio
Zach Carter, “Stephanie Kelton has the Biggest Idea in Washington,” Huffpost, May 21, 2018:
Scott Ferguson, Maxximilian Seijo, and William Saas, “Colored Property & State Debt with David Freund,” May 16, 2019,
Mathew Forstater, “Taxation and Primitive Accumulation: The Case of Colonial Africa” (2005):
K-Sue Park, “Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America,” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 41, no. 4 (Fall 2016):1006-1035.
Emma Coleman Jordan, “The Hidden Structures of Inequality: The Federal Reserve and a Cascade of Failures,” Journal of Law & Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 1 (June 2017):109-183.
Destin Jenkins
“Forum I: Race, Capitalism, Justice,” Boston Review (2017).
Jens Beckert, Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis 42, (1950).
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (Free Press, 1935, 1998).
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso, 2012).
Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993, 2005).
Ryan Jobson
Norman Girvan, Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
Rhonda E. Reddock, Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History (London; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1994).
Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
Michael-Rolph Trouillot, “Motion in the System: Coffee, Color, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 5, no. 3 (1982): 331-388.
