The Futures of Racial Capitalism

Capitalism appears to be endlessly in crisis but without ever loosening its hold on our lives. New modes of racism and exclusion emerge, but the old ones never go away. We continue to struggle to live and survive in its wake but are unable, still now, to build commonality with each other.

In this incisive book, Gargi Bhattacharyya revisits debates about racial capitalism and its violence through differentiation. Taking the four lenses of prisons, borders, debt and platforms, Bhattacharyya reveals how this moment of capitalist crisis positions humans as expendable, but differentially so, in a process that remakes longstanding racialized hierarchies. Uncovering practices and techniques embedded in the shifting processes of accumulation and state power, the chapters illuminate how value is extracted from populations through non-wage routes and indebtedness.

This engaging introduction to racial capitalism offers an interlocking and insightful analysis of capitalist renewal, essential for students and scholars interested in issues of race, racism and inequality. Preface: Staying Human

Introduction: If Not Theses, then What?

Chapter 1: What is at Stake?

Chapter 2: Why Understanding Racial Capitalism Also Returns to the Question of Social Reproduction

Chapter 3: How to Think About Racial Capitalism in Times of Widespread Indebtedness

Chapter 4: Borders – Small Adaptations in Familiar Techniques of Racial Capitalism

Chapter 5: Prisons and the Carcerality of Transforming Racial Capitalism

Chapter 6: Platform Capitalism as a Remaking of Racial Capitalism

Conclusion: Fun and Games

Afterword: Being Ridiculous

"Gargi Bhattacharyya is one of our greatest public intellectuals. The Futures of Racial Capitalism is gripping in its exposition and profound in its insights – another landmark text in the author’s ongoing exploration of how we might build a more humane world."
Arun Kundnani, author of What is Antiracism?

"The Futures of Racial Capitalism, refusing the analytic comforts of historical continuity, reorders with signature intellectual openness the dismal puzzle that is racial capitalism. Bhattacharyya offers neither plea nor denunciation but an invitation to rearrange ourselves as a collective force against and beyond capitalism’s always adapting assault on our very capacity to be together."
Sivamohan Valluvan, University of Warwick

"Bhattacharyya isn’t interested in having the last word or winning an argument. ‘I’ve done my best to point out the shapes in the water,’ she writes modestly … but it’s important work."
Earthbound Report

"Bhattacharyya's book represents a significant effort to engage in a dialogue between Marxism, social reproduction and critical race theory, critiques of dominant narratives surrounding climate change and critical border studies. This dialogue is undertaken under the theoretical lens of racial capitalism."
Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal

Gargi Bhattacharyya is a writer and researcher based in London.