Topics will vary each semester.

This course considers the intertwined histories of racism and capitalism in the United States and the world from Columbus to Facebook. In the past two decades, activists and academics have returned to the work of a key group of intellectuals, including Karl Marx, WEB DuBois, Angela Davis, Sylvia Federici, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and others to advance the study of what Cedric Robinson has called “racial capitalism.” Since Marx first critiqued the conceptual formation and historical emergence of capital in the middle of the 19th century, narratives about the origins of capitalism grounded in the enclosure of the European commons have now been set into clear relation to the wider history of indigenous dispossession, settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the global plantation system. At the same time, American radicalism beginning in the 1860s has grappled over the question of whether human unfreedom is grounded in class exploitation or racial domination? Is the path to liberation to be found in a working-class revolution or in an uprising of the “wretched of the earth”? Into these questions, the concept of racial capitalism offers an ongoing synthesis by refusing to accept the antinomy of race versus class formations, articulating instead a system in which racial oppression has been built into the very foundation of capitalism. This class will therefore consider the theory and history of racial capitalism alongside the ongoing story of resistance to, and abolition of, this globalized system of oppression.

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