Anna Curcio’s work as an author and editor has consistently grappled with the intersection of feminist political economy, shifting labor relations, and the development of racialized and gendered capitalism. Her work has been vital to presenting and preserving histories of workerist-feminist and autonomous Marxism, while attending to contemporary practices of organizing in contentious social movements and on the “factory floor” of global supply chains. The excerpt published here comes from an essay originally written in 2021, “Le differenze del capitale: Razza, genere, antagonismo, compatibilità,” published as a chapter in Curcio’s most recent book, L’Italia è un paese razzista (Italy is a racist country, 2024). The book is a broad-ranging consideration of the role of racism in the consolidation of the nascent Italian nation-state. Indeed, for Curcio there are two forms of racism that contributed to the development of Italian capitalism and the state. On the one hand, an “internal” racism was developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in relation to the population of the South, constituted as a periphery of European identity—a “razza maledetta” (cursed race) defined by pseudoscience, law, and labor policy. This population was uneasily integrated into the nascent nation as exploitable labor. This internal racism continues to organize the labor market today. On the other hand, Curcio charts the “external” racism produced by and through Italy’s colonial ventures, the subsequent erasure of those histories, and contemporary immigration policies in which the colonized Other reappears in the management of workflows and in a humanitarian discourse of the “refugee crisis.” The passage excerpted here critiques the liberal capitalist commodification of difference that accompanies an intensified management of racialized, exploitable populations. The excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity.
Following the international surge in feminist and trans-feminist mobilizations in recent years, as well as the fires of anti-racist revolt that continue to burn in the United States since the killing of George Floyd, one might say, without exaggeration, that a certain order of feminist and anti-racist discourse has become somewhat mainstream—both in the media and institutional politics. Figures once considered explicitly dangerous by state authorities and the mainstream media have been absorbed as icons of a somewhat “glamorous” anti-racism.
A dramatic case is Angela Davis. After having topped the FBI’s most wanted list in 1970, fifty years later she graced the cover of Vanity Fair and was listed among Time’s 100 Most Influential Women of the Year. Other radical figures, never subject to the same degree of scrutiny and celebrity as Davis, were also embraced by major media outlets. Silvia Federici, who has denounced the capitalist expropriation of women’s reproductive labor since the 1970s, even won over the New York Times, which published a lengthy interview with her in 2021.1 Political institutions have also heeded the call. The election of Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States was accompanied by the mantra “first Black woman in the White House.” Like the celebration of Barack Obama, these images are the representation of the fantasy of a post-racial America—an illusion shattered thunderously by the riots of Ferguson, Baltimore, and St. Louis, not to mention by the ongoing histories of mass incarceration, police violence, and deportation, all predating the particular grotesqueries of Trumpism.
Nor does newfound mainstream media attention on feminist concerns mean the end of gendered subordination. On the contrary, gendered violence has taken on such recursive power as to require the term “feminicide,” and the violent reorganization of reproduction, during and after the pandemic, was undertaken at the expense of women, who were often the first expelled from paid work and returned home to domestic care work. In the space between the visibility gained from feminist and anti-racist struggle and the racist and sexist violence that runs through capitalist society, I would argue that we need to engage in a serious and thorough political analysis of difference within capital—that is, of the capitalist function of race and gender. It should be stressed from the outset, however, that the capitalist functions of race and gender cannot be assimilated into each other; they do not provide for a reductio ad unum. Each follows a specific and different path, while ensuring and regulating a system of inequalities that allows capitalism to exist.
The historical links between capitalist valorization and race and gender subordination are intimate. They are structural and always historically determined by the productive forces within a contested social field and never necessarily so. It is a relationship whose coordinates are mobile, in which race and gender differences can, to varying degrees, follow capital or work to undermine it; struggle is never a given but always at stake in historical processes. In the space of contingency that the process of capital opens, if feminist and anti-racist struggles do not aim to remake power relations, they will function as a prop of capital, as an expression of the systemic compatibility of differences. I am not saying that expressions of race and gender should remain in an antagonistic niche; on the contrary, they need to conquer the “mainstream,” just as they have been doing today. But beyond the glossy covers, struggles must not lose sight of the material conditions that race and gender define. They must become antagonistic struggles within the relations of capital, not struggles for recognition. This is a political knot we urgently need to address.
The hypothesis I intend to put forward [in Italy is a racist country] is that contemporary capitalism does not merely produce difference and construct hierarchies of race and gender. It has also learned to compose them in order to reproduce and fortify differences and inequalities, to capture them within the limits of a capitalist politics of recognition. Beyond “diversity management,” contemporary capitalism now attempts to define a new and specific articulation of the relationship between difference and capital, where race and gender are no longer grounds for exclusion. Nor do they merely fulfill the role of “the inclusion of minorities,” as in previous decades. Today, considerations of race and gender are integral to the narrative of neoliberal capital—this shift on behalf of racialized and gendered capitalism should not be overlooked. Understanding the articulations of power that run through the differences of capital enables us, on the one hand, to eschew a disembodied narrative of anti-racist and feminist struggle, which, it seems to me, is spreading due to the trivialization of social analysis and the nullification of critical thinking within Italy’s educational institutions. On the other hand, it allows us to redirect the analysis to address material social relations. However, it must be emphasized that these social relations are never solely economic in nature but always involve an interweaving of the psychic and the cultural.
Taken in their relation to capital, race and gender are historically determined social categories (not biological ones, as it is still necessary to emphasize) that describe and define subjective forms of life, expectations, and opportunities. They are cultural dispositifs and are socially constructed to organize the relations of production and reproduction of capital; they are never static categories, but always contested within the balance of power of the parties involved. In this sense, race is best described as an action—as racialization, a practice oriented to the differentiation of subjects within a specific structure of hierarchies. Gender can also be understood as the active naturalization of women as the subjects who perform reproductive care work, a role in which capital has historically organized their subordination within social and labor hierarchies. Furthermore, we must recognize the feminization of contemporary labor, in which attributes once considered feminine become a mode of action that organizes production in the context of the crisis of Fordism. On the one hand, we see capital’s interests in producing difference for its own reproduction; difference as a form of social segmentation continues to serve capitalist recomposition. On the other hand, the autonomous action of labor to overthrow the capitalist organization of society can develop through anti-racist and feminist struggle within the social relations of production. In this sense, race and gender define the same horizon of possibilities within the capitalist process, but in a mirror image of one another. They are not a mere superstructure of class; rather, they are constitutive of capitalist social relations.2
In contrast to more traditional Marxist analysis, a growing literature has returned to the concept of primitive accumulation to foreground the distinct roles of race and gender in the long process of capitalist transition. These analyses, which have redefined the Marxist theory of accumulation, have insisted on the structural role of race and gender in both capitalist production and reproduction, helping to renew the way in which the very birth and development of capitalism is understood. The Black radical tradition (critical of the Eurocentrism of orthodox Marxism) and feminist critiques of Marx have, in different ways, pointed out the existence of racism and gender subordination predating capitalism. Even Marx himself, in manuscript notes commenting on Lewis Henry Morgan’s writings on ancient societies, traced women’s social subordination to the introduction of the property system, which replaced the power exercised by women’s reproductive capacity with patriarchal property rights.3 However, while it is true that the subordination of women predates capitalism, just as European “racialism” predates colonial expansion and slavery was an already established reality in Europe before its arrival in the New World, we should not imagine a fluid transfer of behavior and ideas from one mode of production to another.4 In the transition to capitalism, the long legacies of racism and gender subordination in human history live on as a leap in scale. They translate preexisting habits and attitudes into the terms of capitalist rationality. Thus, racism and gender subordination become sites of accumulation and value production in a way that was previously unimaginable.
George Rawick, who has analyzed the relationship between racism and capitalism through the history of slavery in the United States, highlights the “psycho-dynamics of racism” that guaranteed the maximum exploitation of plantation labor as cotton and tobacco exports grew and capitalism moved toward its more organized form.5 This was a psychosocial dynamic that led Europeans to project “what they were afraid to see in themselves” onto slaves and colonized populations. In this sense, the racism at work in slave society was also a way for Europeans to distance themselves from what they had been. More generally, a similar psychosocial dynamic forms the foundation for the new “European” and Western “civilization,” founded on the distinction between the “civic virtues” of white Europeans and the “incivility” of everyone else. This way of understanding and representing reality legitimizes the colonial project of modern Europe and, still today, helps define the social and labor hierarchies that organize contemporary societies.
Feminist criticism also returned to primitive accumulation in order to trace the material origins of women’s subordination. In particular, Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati’s analyses of witch hunts from the fifteenth century onwards allow us to locate, in the long capitalist transition, the incubation of a series of psychological and social transformations that enabled the separation of activities destined to serve production for the market from those intended for the (re)production of subsistence and life.6 In this sense, the “enclosures” that deprived medieval peasants of the land from which they derived their livelihoods also drastically separate wageworkers who produce commodities for sale on the market from unwaged workers who receive no direct payment for the production of the “special” commodity of labor power. This arrangement, and the enormous increase in absolute surplus value it produces, can be understood as the capitalist translation of preexisting patriarchal relations, thereby defining new sexual divisions of labor in the market economy. Throughout this long historical process, the witch hunt and the profound ideological and psychological transformations it implied, the terror and mistrust it produced, and the new forms of life it imposed contributed to a radical reorganization of social relations and reproduction-related activities that expropriated women’s friendships, knowledge, and control over their own bodies. This was a social and legal device that “naturalized” women to reproductive care work and that today, despite major changes in women’s social roles, continues to produce exploitation, subordination, and violence.
Having thus framed the capitalist valorization of race and gender within processes of hierarchical differentiation, we must also examine the reverse process: the composition or (re)assembly of differences within a horizon compatible with capitalism. In this sense, the issues of race and gender to which capital is paying more attention today are increasingly integrated into the terms of cultural production and identity recognition, when not immediately translated into the logic of capital’s command. This is where the most current challenge for feminist and anti-racist struggle opens: the composition of differences as recognition within the logic of capital vs. their conflicting political composition beyond the hierarchies of race and gender. And we are the ones who must choose. If it is impossible to choose not to be racist, given the structural nature of racism in the capitalist mode of production, it is still possible and indeed our responsibility to choose whether and how to be anti-racist.
Jordan Kisner, “The Wages of Housework,” New York Times Magazine, February 21, 2021.
See also “L’invenzione della razza” (The invention of race), in Anna Curcio, L’Italia è un paese razzista (DerriveApprodi, 2024).
Posthumously published as Karl Marx, The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock), ed. Lawrence Krader (Van Gorcum, 1972).
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Greenwood, 1972).
Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, Il grande Calibano: storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (Franco Angeli, 1984); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia, 2004). See also Silvia Federici, Caccia alle streghe e capitale (DeriveApprodi, 2022).
