Race, Social Reproduction, and Capitalist Totality

We live in a historical conjuncture characterized by the rise of a range of social movements that aim to challenge different forms of domination: capitalism, patriarchy, racism, settler colonialism, just to name a few. However, critical scholars remain divided about how to think about the relations between these different struggles. The political stakes in these debates are enormous: attributing primacy to particular social processes or structures risks alienating constituencies that also experience other forms of domination, but analzying these processes as separate structures with their own distinct ‘logics’ makes it difficult to find common ground on which to construct viable political coalitions.

My guest today, geographer William Conroy, has written a series of articles that deal with thorny questions pertaining to the relationship between race, gender, ecology, and capitalism. We’ll be discussing four articles in particular, the links to which you can find on the episode’s page on the New Books Network web site:

Conroy, William. 2023. “Background Check: Spatiality and Relationality in Nancy Fraser’s Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 55 (5): 1091–1113.

Conroy, William. 2024. “Spatializing Social Reproduction Theory: Integrating State Space and the Urban Fabric.” Review of International Political Economy 31 (3): 955–77. 

Conroy, William. 2024. “Race, Capitalism, and the Necessity/Contingency Debate.” Theory, Culture & Society 41 (1): 39–58.

Conroy, William. 2024. “Constitutive Outsides or Hidden Abodes? Totality and Ideology in Critical Urban Theory.” Urban Studies, January 22, 2024.

Each of these articles deals with the question of how to study the interactions between forms of domination without succumbing to the dangers of a) reducing all axes of domination to effects of one fundamental antagonism, or b) reaching the bland conclusion that “everything is related to everything else” without specifying how or why forms of domination are related.

Will is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, and he is a research affiliate of the Urban Theory Lab, which is housed at the University of Chicago.

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