The analysis developed here suggests the pressing need for more radical transformation. Contra progressive neoliberalism, racism cannot be defeated by equal-opportunity domination—nor, contra ordinary liberalism, by legal reform. By the same token, and pace black nationalism, the antidote does not reside in enterprise zones, community control, or self-determination. Nor, contra socialism, as traditionally understood, can an exclusive focus on exploitation emancipate racialized people— nor, indeed, working people of any color; it is also necessary to target expropriation to which exploitation is, in any case, tied. What is needed, in fact, is to overcome capitalism’s stubborn nexus of expropriation and exploitation, to transform the overall matrix, to eradicate both of capitalism’s exes by abolishing the larger system that generates their symbiosis.

ertainly, those who were previously shielded from (much) predation are less than eager to share its burdens now—and not simply because they are racists, although some of them are. It is also that they, too, have legitimate grievances, which come out in one way or another—as well they should. In the absence of a cross-racial movement to abolish a social system that imposes near-universal expropriation, their grievances find expression in the growing ranks of right-wing authoritarian populism. Those movements flourish today in virtually every country of capitalism’s historic core—as well as in quite a few in the former periphery. They represent the entirely predictable response to the “progressive neoliberalism” of our times. The elites who embody that perspective cynically appeal to “fairness” while extending expropriation—asking those who were once protected from the worst by their standing as “whites” or “Europeans” to give up that favored status, embrace their growing precarity, and surrender to violation, all while funneling their assets to investors and offering them nothing in return but moral approval.13

Debt is a major culprit here, as global financial institutions pressure states to collude with investors in extracting value from defenseless populations. It is largely by means of debt that peasants are dispossessed and corporate land grabs are intensified in the capitalist periphery. But they are not the only victims. Virtually all nonpropertied postcolonials are expropriated via sovereign debt, as postcolonial states in hock to international lenders and caught in the vise of “structural adjustment” are forced to abandon developmentalism in favor of liberalizing policies, which transfer wealth to corporate capital and global finance. Far from reducing debt, moreover, the restructuring only compounds it, sending the ratio of debt service to GNP soaring skyward and condemning countless generations to expropriation, some long before they are born, and regardless of whether or not they are also subject to exploitation.

African Americans are a case in point. Displaced by agricultural mechanization and flocking to northern cities, many joined the industrial proletariat, but chiefly as second-class workers, consigned to the dirtiest, most menial jobs. In this era, their exploitation was overlaid by expropriation, as capital failed to pay the full costs of their reproduction. What undergirded that arrangement was their continuing political subjection under Jim Crow. Throughout the era of state-managed capitalism, Black Americans were deprived of political protection, as segregation, disfranchisement, and countless other institutionalized humiliations continued to deny them full citizenship. Even when employed in northern factories, they were still constituted as more or less expropriable, not as fully free bearers of rights. They were expropriated and exploited simultaneously.12

Racialization was further strengthened by the apparent separation of expropriation and exploitation in “liberal” capitalism. In this regime, the two exes appeared to be sited in different regions and assigned to different populations—one enslaved or colonized, the other “free.” In fact, however, the division was never so cut and dried, as some extractive industries employed colonial subjects in wage labor, and only a minority of exploited workers in the capitalist core succeeded in escaping ongoing expropriation altogether. Despite their appearance as separate, moreover, the two exes were systemically imbricated: it was the expropriation of populations in the periphery (including in the periphery within the core) that supplied the cheap food, textiles, mineral ore and energy without which the exploitation of metropolitan industrial workers would not have been profitable. In the “liberal” era, therefore, the two exes were distinct but mutually calibrated engines of accumulation within a single world capitalist system.

That is precisely what happened when mercantile capitalism gave way in the nineteenth century to what is misleadingly called “liberal” or “laissez-faire capitalism.” In this new regime, the two exes became more balanced and interconnected. Certainly, the confiscation of land and labor continued apace, as European states consolidated colonial rule, while the US perpetuated its “internal colony,” first, through the extension of racialized slavery and then, after abolition, by transforming freedmen into debt peons through the sharecropping system. Now, however, ongoing expropriation in the periphery entwined with highly profitable exploitation in the core. What was new was the rise of large-scale factorybased manufacturing, which forged the proletariat imagined by Marx, upending traditional life forms and sparking class conflict. Eventually, struggles to democratize metropolitan states delivered a systemconforming version of citizenship to exploited workers. At the same time, however, brutal repression of anticolonial struggles ensured continuing subjection in the periphery. Thus, the contrast between dependency and freedom was sharpened and increasingly racialized, mapped onto two categorically different “races” of human beings. In this way, the free “white” exploitable citizen-worker emerged as the antithetical flip side of its own abjected enabling condition: the dependent racialized expropriable subject. And modern racism found a durable anchor in the deep structure of capitalist society.

ut dependency. As a result, that status did not carry the special stigma it acquired in subsequent phases of capitalism, when majority ethnicity male workers in the core won liberal rights through political struggle.

the capitalism/racism nexus is not only structural but also historical.

The common thread here, once again, is political exposure: the incapacity to set limits and invoke protections. Exposure is the deepest meaning of expropriability, the thing that sets it apart from exploitability. And it is expropriability, the condition of being defenseless and liable to violation, that constitutes the core of racial oppression. What distinguishes free subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects of expropriation is the mark of “race” as a sign of violability.

To see how, let us look more closely at political subjectivation—especially at the processes that mark off free exploitable citizen-workers from dependent expropriable subjects. Both these statuses were politically constituted, but in different ways. In the capitalist core, dispossessed artisans, farmers, and tenants became exploitable citizen-workers through historic processes of class compromise, which channeled their struggles for emancipation onto paths convergent with the interests of capital, within the liberal legal frameworks of national state

My thesis is that the racializing dynamics of capitalist society are crystalized in the structurally grounded “mark” that distinguishes free subjects of exploitation from dependent subjects of expropriation. But to make this case requires a shift in focus—from “the economic” to “the political.” It is only by thematizing the political orders of capitalist society that we can grasp the constitution of that distinction—and with it, the fabrication of “race.”

In general, then, expropriation is a structural feature of capitalism—and a disavowed enabling condition for exploitation. Far from representing separate and parallel processes, those two exes are systemically imbricated—deeply intertwined aspects of a single capitalist world system. And the division between them correlates roughly but unmistakably with what Du Bois called “the color line.” All told, the expropriation of racialized “others” constitutes a necessary background condition for the exploitation of “workers.”

But the connection is not just historical and contingent. On the contrary, there are structural reasons for capital’s ongoing recourse to racialized expropriation. By definition, a system devoted to the limitless expansion and private appropriation of surplus value gives the owners of capital a deep-seated interest in confiscating labor and means of production from subject populations. Expropriation raises their profits by lowering costs of production in two ways: on the one hand, by supplying cheap inputs, such as energy and raw materials; on the other, by providing low-cost means of subsistence, such as food and textiles, which permit them to pay lower wages. Thus, by confiscating resources and capacities from unfree or dependent subjects, capitalists can more profitably exploit “free workers.” And so, the two “exes” are intertwined. Behind Manchester stands Mississippi.4

Distinct from Marxian exploitation, expropriation is accumulation by other means. Dispensing with the contractual relation through which capital purchases “labor power” in exchange for wages, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into the circuits of capital expansion. The confiscation may be blatant and violent, as in New World slavery— or it may be veiled by a cloak of commerce, as in the predatory loans and debt foreclosures of the present era. The expropriated subjects may be rural or indigenous communities in the capitalist periphery— or members of subject or subordinated groups in the capitalist core. Once expropriated, they may end up as exploited proletarians, if they’re lucky—or, if not, as paupers, slum-dwellers, sharecroppers, “natives,” or slaves, subjects of ongoing expropriation outside the wage nexus. The confiscated assets may be labor, land, animals, tools, mineral or energy deposits—but also human beings, their sexual and reproductive capacities, their children and bodily organs. What is essential, however, is that the commandeered capacities get incorporated into the valueexpanding process that defines capital. Simple theft is not enough. Unlike the sort of pillaging that long predated the rise of capitalism, expropriation in the sense I intend here is confiscation-cum-conscriptioninto-accumulation.

the subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits. Absent an account of the first, we cannot fully understand the second. Nor can we glimpse the structural basis of capitalism’s historic entanglement with racial oppression.

Both these matters—dependent labor and political subjection—come into view, however, when we take up the standpoint of expropriation. Developed by theorists of imperialism, this way of thinking about capitalism broadens the frame beyond “the metropole” to encompass the conquest and looting of peoples in “the periphery.” Adopting a global perspective, its practitioners disclose a hidden barbaric underside of capitalist modernity: beneath surface niceties of consent and contract lie brute violence and overt theft. The effect is to cast a new light on exchange and exploitation, which now appear as the tip of a larger, more sinister iceberg.

On this point, at least, the exploitation perspective sits uncomfortably close to that of exchange. While demonstrating that capital is accumulated off the back of free waged labor, it sheds little if any light on how race figures in the system and why it plays such an outsized role in capitalism’s history. Failing to address that issue, it can only convey the impression that the system’s entanglement with racial oppression is contingent.

Capitalism, on Marx’s view, is no mere economy, but a social system of class domination, centered on the exploitation of free labor by capital in commodity production.

Much could be said about this view, but what is important for my present purposes is this: it delinks capitalism from racism by definitional fiat. By defining capitalism narrowly, as an inherently colorblind, utility-maximizing logic, the exchange-centered view relegates any racializing impulses to forces external to the market, which distort the latter’s operation. The culprit is, therefore, not (what it understands as) capitalism, but the larger society that surrounds it. Racism comes from history, politics, and culture, all of which are viewed as external to capitalism and as only contingently connected to it. The effect is to formalize capitalism, reducing it to a means/end economizing logic and stripping away its historical and political contents. In this way, the market-centered view obscures a crucial point that will be central to my argument here: for structural reasons, capitalist economies require “non-economic” preconditions and inputs, including some that generate racial oppression. Failing to reckon with that dependence, this view obfuscates the system’s distinctive mechanisms of accumulation and domination.

Is capitalism necessarily racist? Everything depends on what exactly is meant by capitalism—and on the perspective from which we conceive it. Three such perspectives are worth exploring. A first approach, taught in economics courses, assumed in business, and enshrined in common sense, views capitalism through the lens of market exchange. A second, familiar to socialists, trade unionists, and other protagonists of labor struggles, locates the crux of capitalism at a deeper level, in the exploitation of wage labor in commodity production. A third perspective, developed by critics of imperialism, puts the spotlight instead on capital’s expropriation of conquered peoples. Here, I suggest that by combining the second and third perspectives we gain access to what is missed by each of the three approaches considered alone: a structural basis in capitalist society for racial oppression.

First, I defend the thesis that capitalism harbors a structural basis for racial oppression given that it relies on expropriation as a necessary condition for exploitation. Then, in a second step, I historicize that structure by sketching the shifting configurations of those two exes in the principal phases of capitalism’s history. In my third step, finally, I consider the prospects for overcoming racial oppression in a new form of capitalist society that still rests on exploitation and expropriation but does not assign them to two sharply demarcated populations.

Contra proponents of necessity, however, I shall argue that capitalism’s exploitation/expropriation nexus is not set in stone. Rather, it mutates historically in the course of capitalist development, which can be viewed as a sequence of qualitatively different regimes of racialized accumulation. In each phase, a historically specific configuration of the two exes underpins a distinctive landscape of racialization. When we follow the sequence down to the present, we encounter something new: a form of capitalism that blurs the historic separation of exploitation from expropriation.

hat basis resides, as I shall explain, in the system’s reliance on two analytically distinct but inter-imbricated processes of capital accumulation, exploitation and expropriation. It is the separation of these two “exes,” and their assignment to two different populations, that underpins racial oppression in capitalist society.

I shall maintain that there does exist a structural basis for capitalism’s persistent entanglement with racial oppression.

Is capitalism necessarily racist? Can racial oppression be overcome within capitalist society?

they did not attempt to clarify the relation between capitalism and racial oppression.

What is the nature of this entanglement? Is it contingent or structural? Did the capitalism/racism nexus arise by chance, and could matters have in principle been otherwise? Or was capitalism primed from the get-go to divide populations by “race”? And what about today? Is racism hardwired in the deep structure of contemporary capitalism? Or is a nonracial capitalism finally possible now, in the twenty-first century?

That proposition clearly holds for the slave-based plantation capitalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But it is equally true of the Jim Crow industrialized capitalism of the twentieth century. Nor can anyone reasonably doubt that racial oppression persists in the deindustrializing, sub-prime, mass-incarceration capitalism of the present era.

They’re not a thing anymore. And this test that sort of shuttled him into that class is banned for Black kids.   JAD: And the judge didn’t say ban it for everyone, or revise the test, or de-bias the test or whatever. He said just don’t give it to Black kids.   PAT: Yeah, exactly.   JAD: But if you’re a white kid or if you’re a Spanish-speaking kid or a Hispanic kid or a ESL kid, you can take it?

Everyone was saying, you know, I have no idea. And to be honest, nobody seemed terribly interested, you know? And -- because everyone talks about it, Larry P. is a case.   PAT: And she was like, "What about Larry P. the person?" Which is how she ended up in that little house outside Seattle hanging out with Darryl Lester.  

Defendants have utilized standardized intelligence tests that are racially- and culturally-biased, have a discriminatory impact against Black children, and have not been validated for the purpose of essentially permanent placements of Black children into educationally dead-end, isolated, and stigmatizing classes for the so-called educable mentally retarded." He says, "We must recognize at the outset that the history of the IQ test and of special education classes built on IQ testing is not the history of neutral scientific discoveries translated into educational reform. It is a history of racial prejudice, of social Darwinism, and of the use of the scientific quote 'mystique' to legitimate such prejudices. Defendants' conduct in connection with the history of IQ testing and special education in California reveals an unlawful segregative intent." To dumb it down, he's basically saying they proved everything that they set out to prove. That this was just a disguised form of segregation, you know, under the guise of science

The main guy within the department in charge of the classes for the mentally retarded and the IQ test.   PAT: That Armando says pretty much stops everyone in their tracks.   ARMANDO MENECAL: I'd pretty much gotten him into a corner where he basically admitted that yes, he believed that there were more mentally retarded Black people than white people. And Peckham goes, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying you really believe that there are more Blacks who are mentally retarded?" And the guy said, "Yes!"

What we were attempting to prove is that that test mislabeled blacks as being intellectually inferior.

The average shifts down. The average score of Black kids was lower than the average score of white kids.

: So really what the WISC is measuring is assimilation into American culture, and how well you assimilate as a predictor. Not so much your actual intelligence and what you know.

Comprehension.   PAT: This is Brandon Gamble again.   BRANDON GAMBEL: And with comprehension, they may ask somebody kind of a moral question, even.   PAT: The kid is given a hypothetical social situation and asked how they should respond. Like, what should you do if you cut your finger? Or why are criminals locked up? Or why is it generally better to give money to a charity than someone begging on the street? Or why should a promise be kept? And Brandon says like a lot of parts of this test, these questions don’t have a single right answer, which means they can be biased towards people who answer the question in the way the people who made the test think it should be answered. Which is a big problem if you don’t think the way the people who made the tests think. Brandon told us about one of these questions that he ran into when he started working as a school psychologist.

: He said the WISC arbitrarily favors abstract-sounding answers, like salt is a compound. And he is asked why is that any more intelligent than saying salt is from the ocean?

Now, the people who make these tests would explain to you that the point of a question like that is that a lot of kids won't know the answer. That's question number 16, so it's supposed to be hard. The point of it being on there isn't that, like, knowing that information in particular is especially important, but the test-makers have figured out that the kids who get that question right are more likely to do well on all the other parts of the IQ test, because of that G thing we talked about before. The problem is, there are all kinds of other variables at play here. Like, whether you know who wrote Romeo and Juliet might say something about your intelligence, but it might also just be an indication of whether your parents told you about Shakespeare, or whether you learned about him in school.

He was a big expert on racial bias in education and testing.

And so these Black psychologists were like, "What about non-white kids?"   BRANDON GAMBEL: If that child is not from that cultural frame and that cultural experience, they may give different answers.   HAROLD DENT: The IQ test scores did not deal with the background and experiences of Black children.

What gets us to the trial is, right around the time Larry P. bumped into the test, people had finally started to push back against it. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and this group of young Black psychologists had stepped up and said, "Hey, this test is a problem. Not only because of its history, but also because of the way it’s made now."   HAROLD DENT: The tests did not consider the experiences and the backgrounds of minorities or Black children, or children who did not have a white middle-class background.

To track people. Earmarking people for the right jobs. Making sure they get to the right schools, etcetera, etcetera. There is a kind of efficiency clause in this which is, you know, let's make the society more efficient by allocating the right resources to the right people.

America, particularly around that time in the post-war period, was a very quantitative society.   PAT: The economy was booming, and we were obsessed with measuring things.

The Nazi version of eugenics started in the mid-1930s, when they began forcibly sterilizing and then executing thousands of people that they'd classified as mentally ill, disabled, or what they called feeble-minded. Meaning that they'd scored low on an IQ test. This program was called T4, and it was a precursor to, and essentially a training ground for the mass executions of Jewish people that over the next several years would become the Holocaust.   SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE: So in the span of just about 30-35 years, you go from something called G to selective sterilization mandated by a court, to selective extermination mandated by a state. And that happens in the span of 30 years.

Because the thing we haven't mentioned about Charles Spearman and a lot of these early intelligence scientists is they were eugenicists. And so the whole early history of IQ testing is wrapped up in this ideology, you know, that these guys thought they could selectively breed people to create some kind of master race. And we're gonna go deep into that part of the history in a future episode with the help of Lulu Miller, one of the creators of Invisibilia. But suffice to say, once IQ tests were being used to pick people to be sterilized, it just kept getting worse.

The tests were now being used as a social instrument, a way to classify people rather than help individuals.]

And the moment this G idea got walked out into the room by Charles Spearman, this is the moment that Pandora's Box sort of got ripped wide open. Because now there weren't lots of different kinds of intelligences. Intelligence wasn't complicated. There was just this one kind. And Spearman believed we each had a certain amount of it from the time we were born. And that that could somehow be measured with a test.

General intelligence.

Binet was very explicit about the fact that he didn't think the mark in his tests should be considered a permanent thing about someone.  

At the turn of the century in France, there was a lot going on.   [ARCHIVAL CLIP: That was a time of expansive social change.]   PAT: The church and the state were separating.

And so Darryl's mom and the parents of five other little kids got together and filed a class-action lawsuit against the school district, arguing that their kids had been essentially denied their education by being put in these classes inappropriately because of an IQ test that deemed them mentally retarded.

out?" And -- and the mom says, "That he's been designated mentally retarded." That's how she learned that he was in a class for educable mentally retarded kids. She'd never known that.

Gerald West is gonna pay her a visit. He says West is a member of the Association of Black Psychologists.  

: Darryl was in that class for more than a year. And then fast forward, and one day Darryl’s mom is at home and she gets a phone call.   LEE: Well, she gets a phone call apparently from one of the NAACP attorneys.

Going to the zoo, Golden Gate Park. What is this, you know? They wasn’t teaching us nothing. You know, I walked to school and cried all the way. And by the time I got close to

Darryl says they spent about ten minutes a day on reading, ten minutes a day on math, and about five-and-a-half hours outside.

In Darryl’s new class, there were 10 students.   DARRYL LESTER: It was mostly Black.   PAT: Four boys, six girls.   LEE: And what -- what was, like, a normal day like in there?   DARRYL LESTER: A normal day? A headache. A straight up headache, because some kids was loud, some kids was obnoxious. Some kids just didn’t care.

o the way she describes it in her testimony, it says, "Well, I was told that Larry was a slow learner and he needed the help, you know, in his schoolwork. And by putting him in this class, I was under the impression he was put there so he could get more attention."

So Darryl goes home. He’s not really sure what happened, but he feels like he didn’t do well at it, whatever it was. And eventually, someone from the school approaches Darryl's mom and says, “We need to put your son in a different class.”

The reality was that he had a reading issue -- I’m sure it’s fair to call it like, a reading disability.

Darryl said -- he said, really from the very -- from the very beginning, he said he did fine in math.   DARRYL LESTER: I'm good when it come to numbers.   LEE: But he could not keep up with the reading.

The man at the front would have taken out a bunch of little green booklets.

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children.

And then one day in the first grade, a teacher grabs Darryl and a couple other kids, pulls them out of class, and walks them down the hallway to this room.

So everything was going pretty well for Darryl. Except for school.

She decided to take the whole family -- she and her five boys -- and move them to San Francisco because she wanted to get away from segregation. And this was at a time when the Civil Rights Movement is like ...   DARRYL LESTER: We was there during the '60s.   PAT: At its peak

He’s about 60 years old now. The lawsuit happened back in the 1970s. And he was very surprised that this reporter had showed up wanting to talk to him about something that had happened back when he was, like, 10.

DARRYL LESTER

A lawsuit. But the problem was, the guy at the center of that case, Larry P., that was a pseudonym. And the actual guy, whoever he was, had basically vanished. No one had heard from him in about 40 years. But, Lee was able to track him down in a small neighborhood just outside Seattle.

Lee Romney.   LEE: I'm an education reporter for KALW Radio.   PAT: And last year she got kind of obsessed with that question.

And they’re kind of massive in schools. More than a million kids get IQ tested every year. They're used mainly to figure out which kids will get into gifted programs and which kids will get special-ed services. But in California, if your kid is Black, they almost definitely won’t get one

Every branch of the military uses them. They’re used in the justice system.

Thousands of companies use them to pick employees.

IQ tests are kind of all over the place.

I thought they were something that had been tossed out years ago.

Can I just ask a basic question? IQ tests. People still use IQ tests?

eah, they are. And then they kind of look to me like, “Well, what do you think?” It, like, put us in an awkward -- like up until that moment they’re my supervisor. Now they’re at a loss as to what to do and to talk about.

He’s the Dean of Student Success at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama. But back in the mid-'90s, Brandon had just gotten a job as a school psychologist in Long Beach, California.

that it is illegal in the state of California to administer an IQ test to a child if he or she is Black, even when dispensed by a school psychologist as part of a professional assessment.

Yeah. But before they did, more than one person brought the same idea. And this idea really stuck in my head. Like, we -- a group of us kind of became obsessed with it. And that's the idea we decided to base this series on. And I'm not going to tell you what it is. Yet.

What makes an idea dangerous?

His ideas are dangerous.

"You’ve never even listened to the guy talk. Like, we’re having all these arguments about his ideas, and you’ve never even listened to him."