A world in reverse: The political ecology of racial capitalism
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721994439 |
| Author | Bikrum Singh Gill |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721994439
Politics
2023, Vol. 43(2) 153 –168
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395721994439
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A world in reverse: The political
ecology of racial capitalism
Bikrum Singh Gill
Virginia Polytechnic and State Institution, USA
Abstract
This article advances a ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ approach to further our understanding
of the underlying systemic relations and logics of power driving planetary ecological crises. The
particular concern here is to demonstrate how race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive
society/nature relation fuelling both the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the
capitalist world-system. It does so by first identifying, as a foundational space-time of racial
capitalism, a socio-ecological contact zone within which Indigenous and Black peoples’ earth-
worlding capacity, situated in deep time and place, is indispensable to the survival of ‘late arriving’
Euro-Western settlers. It is out of the refusal of an emergent settler-master to recognize their
dependence upon Indigenous and Black earth-world-making gifts that, this article argues, race
emerges as a structuring relation of power transmuting such earth-worlds into lands and bodies
given by nature/Earth. Such a transmutation functions to conceal the underlying reproductive
conditions – Indigenous and Black earth-worlding capacity – of that which is now marked as
nature/Earth. It is, then, the racialized production of nature that accounts, ultimately, for both the
excess (from appropriation of Indigenous and Black earth-worlds) and exhaustion (from erasure
of their constituting conditions) of the political ecology of racial capitalism.
Keywords
capitalism, political ecology, primitive accumulation, race
Received: 7th August 2020; Revised version received: 16th November 2020; Accepted: 19th December 2020
Introduction
This article aims to demonstrate the utility of the racial capitalism framework to our
understanding of planetary ecological crises. Capitalism has been centred by an emergent
Capitalocene framework as the primary systemic determinant destabilizing the geological
foundations of life and, in so doing, generating the conditions for the emergence of eco-
logical crises on a planetary scale (Moore, 2017). This includes the climate crisis threat-
ening to render large portions of Earth uninhabitable, as well as inter-related crises of
habitat loss, mass extinction, and soil exhaustion. Within the Capitalocene framework,
the evident racialized consequences of these crises (Verges, 2017) are accounted for by
Corresponding author:
Bikrum Singh Gill, Department of Political Science and ASPECT, Virginia Polytechnic and State Institution,
Major Williams Hall, Room 517, 220 Stanger Street, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.
Email: bikrum@vt.edu
994439POL0010.1177/0263395721994439PoliticsGill
research-article2021
Special Issue: Race & Climate Change
154 Politics 43(2)
positioning race as an uneven distributional mechanism that derives from the distinctive
‘Cartesian’ society–nature dualism emerging out of capital’s founding moments of primi-
tive accumulation (Moore, 2015: 18). Race is positioned here as one particular form of a
broader category of ‘cheap natures’ necessary for capital to repress labour costs and
increase profits.
Rendering race as derivative of capitalism risks, however, obscuring the significance
of racialization to both capitalism’s productive power and its ecological exhaustion.
Engaging the racial capitalism framework, with its premise of race as a constituting con-
dition of possibility for the emergence of capitalism (Bhandar, 2018; Burden-Stelly, 2020;
Robinson, 2000), accords a more foundational significance to race as a structuring rela-
tion of power driving planetary ecological crises. A recent article by Charisse Burden-
Stelly (2020) has clarified how race is the necessary generative premise for a category of
labour that is distinctly subject to ‘superexploitation’ and which has, thus, operated as an
essential condition of possibility for capital accumulation. This article builds from such
an emphasis on race as foundational to capitalism, but shifts attention from the capital–
labour contradiction to a consideration of the constitutive role played by race in the capi-
tal–nature contradiction (O’Connor, 1998). The particular concern will be to demonstrate
how race underwrites, rather than derives from, the Cartesian society–nature dualism
fueling both the excess and exhaustion of capital accumulation.
This objective will be approached through an engagement with an under-explored
premise of Cedric Robinson’s (2000: 74–100) original articulation of the racial capitalism
framework in Black Marxism – what I would characterize as the reversal of dependence.
This premise, which I read as an integral point of departure for the unfolding of racial
capitalism, begins not with an assumption of achieved colonial conquest, but rather by
locating Euro-Western subjects in an originary peripheral relation of dependence upon
the ‘Other’ worlds of Africans and Indigenous Americans. Race, as an ontological condi-
tion of possibility for capitalism, emerges in significant part as a material-conceptual
project centred upon overcoming, and indeed reversing, these originary relations of
dependence. This article further explores how race consolidates such a reversal by open-
ing material-conceptual space (Sluyter, 2001) for the articulation of the distinctive soci-
ety–nature dualism underlying capitalism’s productive power and ecological exhaustion.
The account offered here of the ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ will thus begin
from within the socio-ecological space of the contact zone (Pratt, 1991) that exceeds the
space-time of conquest in so much as its originary constitution is marked by the depend-
ence of Euro-Western survival upon ‘earth-worlds’ forged by Indigenous and Black peo-
ples. In centering both Indigenous and Black contestations with an emergent Euro-Western
settler-master, I am following Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) ‘coloniality of being’ framework
that foregrounds how the racialized ontology of capitalism emerges and functions through
relational, yet distinctive, ‘society-nature’ forms that both locate Indigenous people as
closer to nature so as to enable the usurpation of sovereignty and transmute Black peoples
into ‘bodies’ of nature to be exhaustively exploited under conditions of enslavement. I
aim to build on Wynter’s framework by demonstrating how such distinctive co-produc-
tions of race and the society/nature dualism are generated from an emergent settler-mas-
ter’s attempted ‘reversal of dependence’ on Indigenous and Black earth-worlds. The
earth-world signifies here the co-productive relationship between Indigenous and Black
worlding, in the form of socio-ecological practice and knowledge, and non-human earth-
system properties such as soil fertility and mineral deposits. It is out of these earth-world-
ing capacities, this article suggests, that the contact zones were opened as life-provisioning
gifts enabling the survival of late arriving European peoples.
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