Demystifying Racial Monopoly

Through analysis of private, public, and state reactions to the Great Depression and northward black migration, this thesis demystifies four key functions of race constitutive of capitalist racial monopoly: historical availability, division of labor, motivation of surplus absorption, and embodiment of false consciousness. Nonetheless, the working class’s immanent limitations and transcendent activities in this paradigm later gave rise to the 1950s and 60s racial liberation movement’s social constructionist critiques. The following counterintelligence reactions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation neutralized, abstracted, and mystified such racial politics, rendering their truncated identarian form available to a variety of political groups from the anti-racist left to the ethnonationalist right. In this way, capital now appropriates resistant racial politics as part of a commodified and mutually antagonistic multiracial plurality. To resuscitate multiracial coalitional politics that can challenge capital’s racial monopoly, today’s anti-racism must reassess the historical development of racial monopoly in the mid-twentieth century.2023-08-0