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Paper short abstract

This paper seeks to add specificity to the ways capital reaps value from racialized flesh. Treating race as a dynamic index of transformative potencies, it compares the ways race is activated by productivist (plantation) and speculative (necrocapitalist) value regimes in late-20th century Ecuador.

Paper long abstract

This paper seeks to add ethnographic and theoretical specificity to the ways capital reaps value from racialized flesh. Approaching race less as a static taxonomy of unevenly distributed containers of value to be mined from laboring bodies and more as a dynamic index of different transformative potencies for accentuating value through the labor process, it seeks to identify the different ways race is deployed and activated under different kinds of value regimes. For this, it stages a conversation between two capitalist formations growing up simultaneously in late-20th century Ecuador, an export plantation system relying heavily on racialized Indigenous labor and a counter-insurgency regime of state terror intimately tied to the global necrocapitalist war economy. In the former, a productivist regime, race operates as a life-enhancing framework for Indigenous laborers to achieve post-racial forms of personal growth alongside their mastery of quality metrics in commodity production. In the latter, race marks the body of the dead or tortured insurgent, identifies its expulsion from the community of rights, but generates value through circulation in the global death economy as a speculative commodity or derivative, the material referent for flourishing terror industries promising security to expanding capitalist formations. This paper challenges us to attend to the historically particular ways “all capitalism is racial capitalism”. Consistent with postcolonial racial systems in Latin America, the two cases examined show race operating as a technology of personal transformation activated by the specific modes of value extraction built into the material work of plantation and political labor.