I had the great pleasure of listening to Kirsteen Paton last week, who gave a lecture on her recently published book, Class and Everyday Life. A Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Class at the University of Glasgow, Paton brilliantly reminded us that social reproduction is the primary site of class formation and argued that housing struggles are key terrains to understanding this. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser, Salar Mohandesi, and Emma Teitelman, Paton highlighted how urban scholarship has tended to investigate housing struggles through social movements rather than through class analysis (as if class only represented labor struggle). In Paton’s view, this is an oversight that obscures how the “politics of the kitchen” can create local-level solidarities through “differentiated class positions” and intersectional power.
Curious to know how she understood race within her theoretical framework, I asked how racialized differentiation could be taken into account. Paula Mulinari, a colleague, added to my question, wondering if there was a risk of making a similar mistake as the scholars that saw urban struggle in everything when it should have been class contestation: in this case, seeing everything as class struggle when some things might be racial struggles. Paton answered that to understand differentiation, we needed to ask ourselves what our link to capitalism is.
Paton’s response left me thinking of Fraser’s work on racialized capitalism and her argument that while some bodies are the objects of business-as-usual exploitation, others, the bodies seen as expendable, are the subjects of expropriation (Fraser 2016). In other words, there is a big difference in the links to capitalism between the free exploitable citizen-worker and the dependent expropriable non-human. The debate about the role of race within the workings of capitalism is, of course, not new. Audrey Kobayashi (2014) shows us how it was not until the 1990s, after decades during which class overshadowed all critical analysis, that scholarship began to take race seriously in relation to the development of capitalism. While the discipline of urban geography has, during the last decade, moved forward in its understanding of racialized differentiation through the work of, for example, Cedric Robinson and other scholars of the Black Radical Tradition, work remains to be done (Fonseca Alfaro 2024). It is not enough to acknowledge race as an element of capitalism, but rather to conceptualize processes of racialization as constitutive elements of capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018).
The conceptualization of what constitutes our differentiated links to capitalism might have been a point of discussion during Paton’s lecture, but, nevertheless, she raised an important point: the left needs an opening to go beyond what can broadly be referred as identity politics, and the sites of social reproduction are key.
References
- Bhattacharyya G (2018) Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. New York: Rowman & Littlefield
- Fraser N (2016) Expropriation and exploitation in racialized capitalism: A reply to Michael Dawson. Critical Historical Studies 3(1):163–178
- Kobayashi A (2014). The Dialectic of Race and the Discipline of Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 6: 1101–1115. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.958388.
- Fonseca Alfaro C (2024) Contours of racial capitalism, urban geography, and infrastructure. Geography Compass 18(9) https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70002
- Paton K (2024) Class and Everyday Life. Oxon: Routlegde.
Featured image: Image created using DALL-E by OpenAI.
Claudia Fonseca Alfaro 