Capital and race in an age of financialized urbanization

This thesis reframes the question of value within a financialized, urbanized and racializing mode of social organization, to re-animate the radical political stakes of Marxian theory for our time. I argue that the current moment needs a reconsideration of wage-labour within the Marxian labour theory of value to make a more ‘unitary’ theory of value possible, which does not relegate race to an ‘extra-economic’ factor external to Marx’s critique. To do this, I bring together urban political economy, critical urban racial capitalist analysis, Black Studies and feminist social reproduction analysis, to demonstrate that capital should be understood today as what philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “juridico-economic” relation rather than a purely economic one. Through four interconnected chapters, I show how financialization and urbanization foreground property ownership, and the commodification of the asset-form, for coordinating value-in-process (Chapter 1). This contemporary situation demands we expand beyond narrowly examining capitalism’s class dynamics to consider more broadly how class-stratified society reproduces itself, with the fundamental tension existing between those who own and those who do not. With this central opposition in view, I then turn to examine contemporary critical urban racial capitalist analysis, which inadequately reconciles race with a Marxian class critique by treating it as supplementary to economic class relations (Chapter 2). I suggest that instead, the Afropessimist challenge must be addressed should the radical potentialities of a Marxian labour theory of value be preserved. Specifically, Afropessimism challenges the metaphysics of self-recognition that Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish is based in, which holds that the dis-alienation of labour-power is only made possible by regaining self-ownership. But this perspective disavows the ongoing inheritance of the juridical realities of slavery, which denies the possibility of self-ownership to many (Chapter 3). This disavowal even animates more expansive feminist theories of social reproduction, which by uncritically accepting the labour theory of value, reproduce heteronormative methodological nationalisms, or global theories of class that subordinate race to class. Instead, I claim that the critical paradigm of ‘mobilities,’ understood as juridically delimited degrees of the freedom to live, is a more appropriate framing to articulate the political stakes of labour and its commodification within the urban reproduction of value-in-process today that does not reproduce the disavowal of constitutive juridicality (Chapter 4).

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