What does capital consume? Racial capitalism and the social reproduction of surplus people

Rachel Goffe and Nikki Luke
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Rachel Goffe: Department of Human Geography, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada
Nikki Luke: Geography and Sustainability, The University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Arts and Sciences, Knoxville, TN, USA

Environment and Planning A, 2024, vol. 56, issue 4, 1311-1319

Abstract: This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.

Keywords: Social reproduction; uneven development; land; electricity; racial capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:56:y:2024:i:4:p:1311-1319

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X241251671

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