Expropriation, Exploitation, and the Neoliberal Racial Order – 7 March 2019

A conversation between Michael Dawson (The University of Chicago) and Nancy Fraser (The New School), in which they discuss race and capitalism. They debate Dawson’s “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order” and Fraser’s “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism.”

Fraser perceives capitalism as an institutionalised social order, whose scope extends far beyond the arrangement of commodity production and exchange in markets. For Fraser, capitalism forges — and draws upon — the social and the political, as well as the economic. Dawson expands this framework to develop the concept of a neoliberal racial order. In doing so, he underscores that capitalism not only began with the brutal expropriation of black labour through slavery, but that its contemporary form — neoliberalism — is sustained by practices that both reproduce and are produced by structural racism.

Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include black political behaviour and public opinion, political economy, and black political ideology. He is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago.

Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She works on social and political theory, feminist theory, and contemporary French and German thought.

The event took place on 7 March 2019. The conversation was recorded as an episode of New Dawn, a podcast series initiated by the Race and Capitalism Project.

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