Racial Capitalism: From 1492 to the Movement for Black Lives

Racial Capitalism examines the conditions under which a specific kind of capitalism emerges at the beginning of the 21st Century—a regime organized through speculation and new forms of exploitation beyond the industrial workplace, in prison and military industrial complexes, where debt accrues to the Black poor, the jobless, and a growing global precariat. This new moment in the history of capital accumulation is approached in several ways: one, through attention to the critical significance of 1492; two, the rise of Atlantic slavery; and three, the emergence of 'racial capitalism' as a system reliant on 'transparently violent means (war, land-grabbing, dispossession, neocolonialism).'