The standard version of capitalism’s history treats race as an unfortunate addition — slavery was bad, Jim Crow was bad, but they were departures from a fundamentally race-neutral economic logic that could be corrected through legal reform. What Cedric Robinson showed in Black Marxism (1983) is that this is backwards. Race wasn’t added to capitalism. It was constitutive of capitalism from its European origins — built into the system of differentiated labor, differentiated rights, and differentiated humanity that made primitive accumulation possible.
This isn’t a semantic dispute. It determines what you think needs to change. If race was added to an otherwise functional economic system, you can reform your way to equity by removing the addition. If race is structural — if the production of racial hierarchy is a feature of how capital accumulates, not a bug — then the reform project fails at the root, because the mechanism keeps producing what it was built to produce.
Three thinkers, one argument
Cedric Robinson · 1983
The Black radical tradition as commons
Robinson’s Black Marxism argued that the Black radical tradition — the resistance tradition built under slavery, colonialism, and apartheid — is not a variant of European Marxism. It’s a distinct political tradition developed under conditions of extreme enclosure: of bodies, of labor, of land, of culture, of the very category of humanity.
What Robinson calls “racial capitalism” is the specific system in which capital accumulation requires the production of racial hierarchy — not just as ideology but as material reality. The plantation was a commons destroyed: the common land of Africa, the common social bonds of African communities, the common labor of captured people, enclosed and extracted for the production of European wealth. Read more on Robinson →
The Black radical tradition is, by Robinson’s account, a tradition of rebuilding commons under conditions designed to prevent it — of mutual aid, collective survival, and cultural maintenance that constitutes the most sustained commons-building project in modern history. This is not metaphor. It is the literal, institutional content of what Black communities built under slavery: the invisible economy, the mutual aid networks, the cultural institutions, the governance systems that the enslaved maintained parallel to and against the plantation.
Walter Rodney · 1972
Underdevelopment as enclosure
Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa made the structural argument that the poverty of Africa in the twentieth century was not a condition Africa arrived at through its own failures. It was produced — deliberately, systematically — through colonial extraction. Underdevelopment is a verb: something done to African economies by the European colonial project, not something they were in.
The mechanism is commons enclosure at continental scale: land, labor, minerals, and the surplus from African economic activity were transferred out of Africa and into European accumulation. What remained was not just poverty but structural dependency — economies reshaped to feed extraction rather than local development, governance structures built for colonial administration rather than community self-determination, educational institutions producing administrators rather than organic intellectuals.
Rodney’s analysis explains why formal decolonization didn’t end the wealth transfers: the structural enclosure of African economic capacity continued through debt, trade agreements, currency arrangements, and the military backing of friendly authoritarian regimes. The tradition they buried is the African political and economic commons that the colonial project destroyed — and that post-colonial movements have been trying to rebuild ever since.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore · 2007
Racism as a production process
Gilmore’s definition from Golden Gulag is the most precise available: racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Every word matters. Production: it’s not a feeling or an attitude, it’s a process that makes things. Group-differentiated vulnerability: the process produces differential life chances structured by group membership. Premature death: the endpoint of full enclosure — not metaphorical death but the literal shortening of lives.
Gilmore developed this definition through her analysis of California’s prison expansion in the 1980s and 1990s — showing how mass incarceration was not a response to crime but a solution to specific surpluses: surplus land (devalued rural real estate), surplus labor (structurally unemployed workers), surplus capital (finance looking for investment vehicles), and surplus state capacity (government needing to do something visible with its power). The prison absorbed each surplus while producing racial enclosure: the geographic, economic, and legal removal of predominantly Black and Latino people from the commons of civic life.
Race wasn’t added to capitalism. It was how capitalism organized enclosure.
What changes when you take this seriously
If racial hierarchy is structurally produced by enclosure, then the fight against racial inequality is, at its root, a fight against enclosure: against the privatization of land, against the commodification of labor, against the removal of communities from the commons of decision-making, against the legal and extralegal mechanisms that maintain differential vulnerability.
This has direct implications for what “anti-racist” work means. Diversity and inclusion programs that redistribute representation within enclosing institutions don’t address the enclosure. Disparity-reduction goals that measure gaps without targeting the mechanisms producing them don’t change the production process. What addresses the enclosure is the same thing that always has: building commons institutions — cooperative ownership, mutual aid, community governance — that remove people’s material conditions from the terrain where enclosure operates.
The second piece in this series looks at a parallel enclosure that the racial capitalism analysis tends to obscure: the enclosure of reproductive labor, and how feminist political economy names the extraction that makes all other extraction possible.