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Paper short abstract

Capitalism since its birth has bound to it other coeval structures of oppression, allowing it to violently expropriate labor and use-values from populations of workers, peasants and indigenous people defined as inferior. Race, gender, caste viewed through the optic of capital’s “value in motion.”

Paper long abstract

Capitalism since its birth has bound to itself other coeval structures of oppression, thus allowing it to violently expropriate labor and use-values from populations of workers, peasants and indigenous people defined as inferior.

Across Trans-Atlantic and Anglophone Pacific Rim regions, capitalism takes the form of racial (and gendered) capitalism. Racialization operates through structures of oppression based on state-defined essential inequalities between biologically/culturally ranked “races” – distinctions predating capitalism but intrinsically joined to its control of labor and other use-values.

Elsewhere, other preexisting structures of oppression are captured by capitalism, but not racial in nature. Caste in South Asia is one such structure of oppression; in East Asia, civilizational distinctions between “civilized” and “barbarian” are another. These structures historically have been multiply entwined with capitalism, marking off specific devalued populations for extraordinary expropriation of their labor and other use values.

This paper offers an analysis of capital as “value in motion” in its four moments of transformation in the accumulation process – valorization, realization, distribution, and conversion (Harvey 2023: 1-23), revealing how during these moments capitalists confiscate surplus-value from specific devalued populations. Examples from historical and ethnographic research on the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia (Nonini 1992, 2015, 2025) illustrate the argument. Violent expropriation by capitalists and the Malayan/Malaysian state of labor and other use values from Chinese as a devalued “race” in Malaysia are examined, as are caste and civilizational structures of oppression.