settlers the myth of the white proletariat

According to Melamed, this means that different forms of humanity are separated or partitioned in order to better serve ‘who can relate and under what terms’. In other words, it works to reduce collective life to only the relations that allow neoliberal capitalism to function. Racial capitalism, according to Gilmore (cited in Melamed) is a technology of antirelationality.

78)Īlso, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore highlights, growing attention to the racialised injustices of the carceral system in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement is also served by the racial capitalism lens. Racial capitalism is also a good framework for some of the central concerns of Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism in Australia, North and South America or Palestine, as the centrality of land fits well with the emphasis in racial capitalism on dispossession, exploitation and extraction.Īs Jodi Melamed writes, ‘accumulation under capitalism is necessarily expropriation of labour, land, and resources’ (p.

It might be said that, in the context of the Trump presidency, a growing dissatisfaction with analyses of race based on identity rather than more material concerns, also contributed to the popularisation of racial capitalism as a framing concept. Many people have identified the concept with the work of Cedric Robinson in his book Black Marxism which, although published in 1983, gained prominence after his death in 2017.

It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation… on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war.’ Over recent years, as Charisse Burden-Stelly remarks, racial capitalism has ‘ascended across the humanities and social sciences. This lecture is a general overview of the theory of racial capitalism. I try to incorporate a critical reflection on my own role as a migrant-settler on Gadigal lands, the benefits that accrue to me as a result, and how I can use spaces like today’s lecture to question why things are the way they are. I remind myself and all of us that – whatever country we are on – these always were and always will be Aboriginal lands. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here. Western Sydney University operates on the lands of the Darug, Tharawal, Eora and Wiradjuri nations.Īnd I am joining you from the unceded lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Universities are built on sovereign Aboriginal lands. The text and accompanying slides of the lecture follow:

Settlers the myth of the white proletariat