Session 2: Deconstructing Racial Capitalism

Key Questions

• What is race? What is racism? What is capitalism? 

• What is the relationship between racism and capitalism? 

• What is racial capitalism? 

• How might we apply racial capitalism to the Prison Industrial Complex?

• What is the relationship between abolition of chattel slavery and PIC abolition? 

• What are reparations?

Required Readings

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete, “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives” (AUDIO)

• Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, “The Negro Question: Red Dreams of Black Liberation”

• Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, “A Day of Reckoning: Dreams of Reparations”

• Robin D.G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism” (PDF)

Supplementary materials

• Book: Jalil Mutaquim, We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings, “A Revolutionary Class Perspective: In Refutation of Black Capitalism”

• Podcast: Intercepted with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

• Video: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Geographies of Racial Capitalism”

• Visual Art: Monica Trinidad

• Primary Source: Gates v. Collier (Parchman Decision, 1972) (PDF)

Recommended Materials

• Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley and Chapter 1

• George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, “Toward the United Front,” 105-113

  • “It isn’t revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionary activity, to build consciousness with political activity and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist. The effect has been reformist rather than revolution” (p. 26)

• Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein, “What Abolitionists Do”

• Robin D.G. Kelley, “What Is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?”

• David Oshinksy, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York, 1996), Chapters 5-6

• “The Folsom Prisoners Manifesto” (1970)

• Attica Prison Liberation Faction, “Manifesto of Demands” (1971)

• National Prison Strike Demands (2018)

• Breaking Down the Prison Industrial Complex, Critical Resistance

• SSJ Think Tank on Racial Capitalism

EXERCISE

Abolitionist Democracy?

1. In “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives,” Angela Davis asks two questions of prisons: Are they racist institutions? And is it so deeply entrenched that we cannot eliminate one without the other? Ask your group these same two questions of capitalism. Take a moment to individually write examples of how racism functions within capitalism (historically and currently) and compare them as a group.

2. At the end of “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives,” Angela Davis writes, “In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system.” First, define “democracy” in your group, saying what the idea means to you. Then, think together about how abolition can remake a political system without racial capitalism at its core. What does participatory government look like after racial capitalism? How does participation in that system work?

READING GUIDE

1. In “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives,” Angela Davis argues that the abolition of chattel slavery created a crisis for racial capitalism because perpetual forced labor was no longer an acceptable punishment for racialized peoples. How did capitalists use the prison to adapt to the world after slavery?

2. In “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Robin Kelley writes, “within Europe [there] was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarcy” before the time of the African slave trade. Where do you see the same processes playing out today, 150 years after the slave trade?

3. In “A Day of Reckoning: Dreams of Reparations,” Robin Kelley gives the example of “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, who thought “a thoroughly democratic structure needed to be in place so that ordinary people could decide what to do with the money,” meaning reparations. Why do you think Moore was so opposed to just another “poverty program” from the federal government?

4. In “A Day of Reckoning,” how does Kelley define reparations? What is its role and relevance to contemporary social movements?

Questions for Supplementary Materials

1. In “Geographies of Racial Capitalism,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to racial capitalism as “all of capitalism.” Why is it important to think and talk about racial capitalism as opposed to just capitalism?

2. In Gates v. Collier (1972), the U.S. Department of Justice and a District Court judge intervened directly to reform the conditions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, aka Parchman farm. However, we know this work failed to fundamentally change the prison or question the PIC’s reliance on punishment and premature death. Imagine your group is working to close Parchman farm in 1972. How might an understanding of racial capitalism have moved the reformers closer to abolition? Where do you see racial capitalism in the court’s “Findings of Fact”? Do you think a court case is designed to account or atone for racial capitalism? What action might your abolitionist group take in addition to litigation?