1 Introduction
Racial capitalism is a concept crafted by South African militants in their struggle against apartheid (Al-Bulushi, 2022). Against an orthodox Marxist understanding of capitalism as a revolutionary force that could ultimately destroy apartheid, these committed intellectuals argued for the centrality of race at the core of capitalism (Alexander, 1979). In South Africa, they asserted, a precondition of capitalism was the preservation of non-capitalist economies, not their destruction; and – they continued – the state played a fundamental role in the racialisation of labour (Levenson & Paret, 2023). The South African-inspired concept of racial capitalism entered, in the following years, a productive dialogue with the knowledge production of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles globally.
The concept of racial capitalism is at the core of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition published in 1983/2021, in conversation with the members of the Race and Class journal, particularly the work of Sivanandan (1982). The impact of Robinson’s book when it was first published was narrow (Issar, 2021; Kundnani, 2020). It is the globality of the Black Lives Matters (BLM) struggle that created the intellectual political space for the re-introduction and popularity of the concept today.
This chapter aims to explore the relevance of the concept for the analyses of Swedish society. What follows is one of the many possible interpretations of the concept and tradition, mostly an exercise in exploration and clarification. It considers the concept and particularly what it reveals when it is used to examine Swedish reproductive racial capitalism. Methodologically, the essay is inspired by the Black/Chicano feminist tradition of intellectual activism (Collins, 2013) and Latin American militant research (Garelli & Tazzioli, 2013).
The chapter is organised as follows. First, an analytical consideration of the strengths and the possible weaknesses of the concept, followed by an assessment of the tension and dialogues between the notion of racial capitalism and Black feminist scholarship, will be introduced. The following four sections explore the race-migration nexus. The empirical material presented evolves from several studies that I (sometimes together with other scholars) have conducted in the last decades. The focus is theoretically driven, aiming to illustrate a possible understanding of an intersectional analysis of Swedish reproductive racial capitalism.
2 The Black Radical Tradition and the Concept of Racial Capitalism
The eurocentrism of social theory has been continuously challenged from diverse locations and geopolitical contexts. Connected sociologies (Bhambra, 2014), postcolonial (Spivak, 1999), decolonial (Dussel, 1995; Mignolo, 2005) and indigenous thought (Coburn, 2020), represent powerful epistemologies that provide a different conceptual frame to analyse the social.
Sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007) uses the notion of Southern Theory to underline the relations of authority, exclusion, inclusion, and hegemony between intellectuals and institutions in the centre and those in the periphery. The originality of Third World revolutionaries in transforming Marxist theory through the visions and practices of anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles (Cabral, 1973; Fanon, 1952/2008; Mariátegui, 1995) provides several powerful conceptual frames relevant to the reading of racial capitalism.
Anti-colonial thought (Go, 2020) argues for the need to provincialise Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000) and points out that there is much to work on in developing conceptual frames that decolonise academic knowledge production:
While imperial sociology embeds the experiences, interests and concerns of metropolitan elites in the Anglo-European centre, anticolonial sociologies embed the standpoint of subjugated peoples whose voices and minds have been marginalised as lesser, inferior, as not offering valuable social knowledge at all. My conclusion, therefore, is that recovering anticolonial thought is to recover an alternative to imperial sociology and its imperial standpoint. If we want an alternative to imperial sociology, surely one place to start is anti-imperial, anticolonial thought, which has for too long been repressed but which might just be the key to unlocking a more expanded sociological imagination that is analytically alive to the elusive relations of power and structures of domination plaguing us today. (Go, 2023, p. 291)
Robinson’s Black Marxism is congruent with anticolonial social thought. In its many versions, it analyses the knowledge production evolving from the political struggles against colonialism and imperialism (Amin, 1989; Said, 1994). The concept (and the tradition) may also be conceptualised as travelling theory (Said, 1983) transformed by different journeys. Clarno and Vally (2023 identified three of these dialectic movements: back and forth between the periphery and the centre, back and forth between activist and academic discourses, and finally back and forth between the concept itself and the specific contextual meanings created through these travels.
The concept of racial capitalism is relevant to achieve an understanding of the Swedish racial formation for the following reasons: First, the concept challenges Eurocentric narratives in social theory, identifying the fundamental role played by the category of race and the transnational slave trade in the development of capitalism. Thus, capitalism is not a break from feudal regimes, but capitalism extended (not abolished or deconstructed) these exclusionary racialised practices. The continuity of the category of race is the means through which different modes of production are coded, managed and legitimated.
Feminist scholar Silvia Federici’s (2018) analysis of capitalism and patriarchy contains several similarities with Robinson’s conceptual frame. However, for Federici, gender is the primary mode of differentiation in the development of capitalism. How fundamental is identifying race as (up to a certain point) primordial to capitalism? Why not gender, as Federici argues, or other forms of hierarchical categorisation? Is capitalism always necessarily racialised or gendered? Federici’s contribution is relevant because it challenges the risk of essentialism in conceptualising racism as a transhistorical primordial ontology that constantly reworks itself in new circumstances. Capitalism and racism may sometimes overlap, as capitalism and patriarchy do sometimes. However, it could be argued that the overlap is an empirical question, not necessarily inherent to capitalist social formations.
Second, the concept of racial capitalism connects ideologies of racism with social relationships aiming at the exploitation of specific categories of people, the appropriation of land and resources and the extermination of specific communities. It is the extraction of value from specific groups and the transference of this value to others. Thus, it is the relational frame of the concept – its interconnectedness – that puts race at the core in the extraction of value, conceptualising relations in terms of appropriation of others’ bodies, labour, and territories. Racial capitalism identifies and analyses the production of social separateness and the fracturing of the relationships between humans and between humans and nature needed for the capitalist expropriation of the value generated by workers’labour.
Third, the concept is rooted in a tradition that challenges and transcends the boundaries between the material and the symbolic, between the economic and the cultural, and between class and race. Racism is not, as orthodox Marxists argue, an ideological intervention aimed at creating divisions among waged workers, but labour is, from its beginning constituted, through racialized (and gendered) social relations. The location of racialised workers in social relations is not only within a ‘more exploitative’ frame but is radically different from that of white workers (Kundani, 2020). Therefore, race, as Stuart Hall (1978) wrote, is the ‘modality through which class is lived’.
Fourth, the concept challenges methodological nationalism through a critique of the nation-state as a repository of social processes that predetermines and defines the object of study of social science and the humanities. This point of departure is vital for the fields of migration and ethnic studies that risk being encapsulated within and through the lens of the nation-state, reinforcing the fantasy of stable (national) communities on the one side and people on the move on the other. A shift from the study of migrants and migration to the study of mobilities (Anderson, 2013; Gutierrez, 2018) provides a more productive arena in the analysis of racial capitalism. The concept confronts the disciplining power at the core of the establishment of the field of migration and ethnicity studies as an academic discipline and the highly problematic link between state governability and knowledge production in a specific object of study – migrants.
Fifth, the concept of racial capitalism is theory in the flesh, as Chicano feminist Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) argued. The concept of racial capitalism in South Africa, where it first developed and currently among scholars who identify with the Black radical tradition, is highly political – it transcends the binary opposition between academic and other forms of knowledge, which is fundamental to thinking about liveable futures. The Black radical tradition is decolonial in its epistemology, not only due to its development within diverse margins but also due to its efforts to bridge the production of pluralistic knowledge systems.
Finally, the concept speaks of hope (Freire, 1992). Cultural practices are conceptualised as fundamental to social justice struggles. According to Robinson (1983/2021) Black cultures of (survival) and resistance are established outside the Western order, or what Okoth (2022) defines as forms of ‘resistance from elsewhere’. In their analysis of racial formations, Omi and Winant (1986) shared with Robinson an acknowledgement of the fundamental role that social movements’ struggles to resist and even transform racial categories play in societal transformations towards social justice. To strengthen the concept of racial capitalism as an activist hermeneutic, Melamed (2015) emphasised the contribution of the Black radical tradition in labelling resistances as forms of re(constituting) collectives.
Defying racial capitalist modes of differentiation that would undermine conditions for peoplehood, the Black radical tradition is antiracist, anticapitalist and collective making because it is a name for struggles that arrange social forces for Black survival over and against capital accumulation. (Melamed, 2015, p. 80)
The centrality of the construction of collectivities and that of culture and spirituality for resistance are not marginal arguments within the Black radical tradition but an analysis of the social and its forms of human agency that defy Eurocentric secularism. The concept and the tradition ‘help us to fight fascism with greater clarity and with ever more questions’ (Kelley, 2021, p. x). The concept of offers a collective space for those who continue to believe in our responsibility as scholars in confronting the knowledge production that shapes necropolitics globally.
Although Sweden follows European trends in the increasing hegemony of ethnonationalist agendas, it is relevant to explore, through the concept of racial capitalism, the tension between an institutionalised state feminism that regulates gender equality policies (Martinsson & Giritli-Nygren, 2016) and the location of the category of migrant women.
3 Racial Capitalism and Intersectional Analysis
Hartmann’s influential anthology with the captivating title, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism Towards a More Progressive Union, published in the late 1970s, is a solid contribution that bridges the Marxist tradition with Marxist feminist frameworks. Its aims of examining human reproduction, gender, and labour (Hartmann, 1981, p. 1), challenging the subordination of Marxist feminism to Marxism, and arguing for ‘a healthier marriage or a divorce’ (Hartmann, 1981, p. 2) continue to be highly relevant today.
The further development of the tradition of Marxist feminists, operationalised through social reproduction theory (SRT), contests orthodox Marxism and argues that the economy comprises not only wage labour but also the ‘complex network of social processes and human relations that produces the conditions of existence’ (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 2). Capitalism depends on domestic labour and on all institutions set up for producing people, such as housing, schools, and hospitals. The ‘social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism’ (Fraser, 2016, p. 22) creates a powerful analytical space because it takes life itself as the starting point. Social reproduction is the work of care and sustenance that makes it possible to extract the surplus value of production while ensuring a steady supply of workers to produce value (Arruzza, 2016; Ferguson, 2020).
Scholars in SRT assert that the concept of intersectionality (Collins, 1990) so central to the Black feminist tradition lacks, an ontology (capitalism), providing an inadequate theorisation of social totality. It is an integrative theory of the social (capitalism) in that social reproduction theorists/Marxist feminists argue what the tradition of intersectionality lacks (McNally, 2017). However, in the last decade, SRT has developed a dialogue with the concept of racial capitalism (Bhattacharya, 2018) and the concept of intersectionality (Ferguson, 2016) towards what scholars consider a more complete SRT framework.
The pioneer works of Davis (1981) and Glenn (1992) on Black women’s reproductive paid labour illustrate the need to understand social reproduction through the axis of racial capitalism, identifying the historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labour. These authors challenge the reading of social reproduction that marginalises racism and the understanding of reproductive labour, treating race and gender as interlocking rather than additive systems. Racial capitalism and intersectionality show how the materiality of oppression and privilege acts upon the extraction of subaltern people’s labour for the benefit of privileged groups and the value transferred from diverse forms of labour between categories of people.
Intersectional analysis explores multiple inequalities or the establishment of categories that create and shape these inequalities. As a sensitising concept, intersectionality poses questions regarding the role of different axes of oppression and domination in the doing of the social and in the fluidity and mutability of social and political identities.
The Black feminist tradition of intersectionality does not search for or provide a theory, as a totalising explanatory intervention. According to Carastathis (2016, p. 109), it is precisely this strength that is conveyed by the notion of a provisional concept – the tentative bridging of the ‘heuristic gap between present and future’ and between dominant ideology and social transformation.
Intersectionality, as a concept, is epistemologically framed through standpoint theory, which learns from the skills and knowledge embodied by those at the margins and explores their standpoint (Collins, 1990) on the social. In feminist theory, the concept of intersectionality within the Black radical tradition (Collins & Bilge, 2016, pp. 25–29). provides a vision of knowledge production within the frames of anticolonial social thought discussed in the first section.
What intersectionality offers is a sensitising concept that productively works in the analysis of social inequalities. In the words of Tomlinson,
Intersectionality is proposed not as an overreaching grand theory but as a politically grounded mid-level theory in the terms that Stuart Hall used in describing the value of Gramsci’s theory, a mid-level theory that complexifies existing theories and problems by connecting large concepts to specific situations, addressing heterogeneous objects of study across many sites and temporality. (Tomlinson, 2018, p. 23)
The concept of intersectionality has been resisted and diluted by mainstream academia (and mainstream gender studies). Several studies have identified diverse strategies through which the concept has been misread, vulgarly questioned, and marginalised (Bilge, 2014; de los Reyes & Mulinari, 2020; Lewis, 2013; Tomlinson, 2018). However, from the transatlantic slavetrade, through the people transformed into migrant workers crossing borders, to the necro-politics of classification between humans and non-humans, many of us have learned to identify, think and act politically through and together with the concept of intersectionality.
The field of intersectionality has been considered the most important contribution of gender studies to social theory. It is often argued that intersectionality gives voice to historically excluded groups. It is true that, up to a certain extent, voice is understood as epistemological resistance against erasure. Intersectionality in the Black radical tradition of conceptualising racial capitalism challenges the tendency of social theory to show the world the privileged position of those historically in control of language and power, thus giving voice and agency to groups and categories of people historically excluded. However, because of the focus on relationality in both concepts, the analysis is not about specific social categories but about the transfer of material and symbolic resources between categories. The materiality of oppression and privilege acts upon the extraction of subaltern people’s labour for the benefit of privileged groups. Relationality points to the value transferred of the diverse forms of labour between categories of people.
4 Exploring the Swedish Racial Formation
The analysis that follows consists of four sections. The first section inscribes Sweden into racial capitalism by analysing Volvo, a transnational corporation located in Sweden (Mulinari et al., 2011). The second section explores the role of the Swedish state in racialisation processes through the creation of the category of migrant women in official government reports, which are privileged sites of knowledge production, as they are closely connected with policymaking and academic practices. The third and fourth sections examine Swedish racial capitalism by rethinking gendered labour through the race migration nexus.
4.1 Racial Capitalism and Swedish Transnational Corporations
I wake up at 04:30, put on the heating on and make breakfast and the children’s lunch. I call the kids while I’m on the bus so that they get up to go to school. … My day comes to an end at 23:30. I go to bed at 00:30. I sleep between 3.5 and 4.5 hours each night. (Olga, Mexico)
I must wake up very early. There is no problem with the elder, as she can manage alone. But for the little one, I must prepare for myself and dress him while I prepare the children’s lunch packages. Then, the little one must come into my room because I must lock my room. That’s the thing – he must wait more than an hour dressed like for school. We must be at work before seven, obviously before seven. One gets tired. I get tired after tea, after two. For example, next week we will go overtime at work, and we’re talking about this. It will be difficult to work from seven to seven, but we will try. (Lesedi, South Africa)
Olga and Lesedi are two of the many female workers at Volvo, employed by a transnational corporation known in the Global South through its “Swedishness” and thus its gender equality profile. In our study, the ‘opportunity’ given to women (or to migrant workers in other transnational corporations) is based on policies aiming at the introduction of new forms of casual and flexible labour regimes through the incorporation of new categories of (more vulnerable) workers. The “opportunities” must be understood in the context of the impossibility of an increasing number of (male) workers to provide for their families, a sign of the expansion of the capitalist economy than of a feminist vision of women’s equality.
The importance of transnational corporations in terms of controlling production, trade and investments in the Global South has increased dramatically over the past decades. In our study (Rätzhel et al., 2014), we explored the diverse and shared experiences of Volvo workers in four different plants in India, Mexico, South Africa, and Sweden. Central to our project was the study of the normality of capitalism, focusing on a ‘Swedish’ corporation that profiles itself as caring for nature and working for gender equality. Sweden is the national home base of Volvo, the ‘core’ in terms of all other production units. It is where the Volvo headquarters is located and where around 28% of the workforce is employed. In 1998, a large Mexican national bus manufacturer, M.A.S.A., was taken over by Volvo through a 100% acquisition at a time when the plant employed 1,600 workers. The self-image of Sweden is usually associated with democracy, social welfare, and gender equality. A main result of our study is the degree of over-exploitation that workers suffered in the plants located in the Global South, as mirrored by Ascencio’s explanation on how difficult it is to manage until Friday:
No, it’s because it’s Friday, and there’s nothing left. We’ve used all the money … everything, and this is despite my wife budgeting our money. It’s that I have to leave as soon as possible; they are waiting back home … they’re hungry … sometimes there’s nothing to eat on a Friday afternoon. (Ascencio, Mexico)
The over-exploitation of workers by providing salaries below the poverty level is woven into a culture of insecurity and fear of losing their jobs. Unable to live on the salaries Volvo paid them, the workers in all the companies we visited told us that they needed to work extra hours and that everyone in their families contributed to the household through diverse forms of self-employment in the informal sector to make ends meet. Many workers we met were grateful for their grandparents or other family members living in rural areas who provided them with food. Others argued that without the support (in terms of food provisions) of their extended families living in rural areas, their children would go hungry. Thus, Volvo’s profit increases by the appropriation of the production of subsistence economies in rural areas. In other words, the exploitation of rural communities through the transfer of their (few) resources to their relatives in urban areas is a decisive part of Volvo’s labour regime.
We also identified both in Mexico and South Africa a workplace culture of (violent) insecurity (fear of losing the job), the opposite of discourses that identify Swedish institutions and companies as embodying perceived Swedish values, such as gender equality and democracy.
The way in which workers are exploited at the Volvo plants in the Global South is at the core of Swedish reproductive racial capitalism.
4.2 Racial Capitalism and the Swedish State
A fundamental contribution of racial capitalism is the exploration of the role of the state in creating and reproducing racialised categories and hierarchies. In Resisting Racial Capitalism, Danewid (2023) interprets Cedric Robinson’s work as an invitation to think (and act) beyond the state and the market. Danewid argues that capitalism relies upon state power to render populations available for capitalist dispossession, exploitation, and abandonment. According to the author, Robinson examined the possibility of organising a society in which the refusal of the state does not develop in a war of all against all but rather the establishment of original and sustainable ways of organising the social.
The central role of the capitalist state in racialisation was a hallmark of Marxist thinking in South Africa under apartheid. Goldberg (2002, p. 7) described the ‘the racial state’ as a modern nation-state in which rules and constructions of race are deeply intertwined (Goldberg 2011) According to Hall (2019), the capitalist state and racist policies are conjunctural and historically specific, and racism is not present in the same form and degree in all capitalist formations. This emphasises the need to analyse the conditions under which nation-states become racial and shift from a racial to a racist regime (Lentin, 2007). How should this construction of differences and the development of classification systems be understood?
Swedish feminist postcolonial scholars have convincingly argued that the concept of a ‘women-friendly welfare state’, which is central to hegemonic gender studies and framed through the category of women, obscures the experiences and the social location of migrant women (and men) and leaves untheorised the relationship between the Swedish welfare and racism and imperialism, illuminating a close connection between assertions of migrants’“cultural differences” and racism.
Like the discourses on migrant women in the United Kingdom analysed by Umut Erel (2013), hegemonic discourses on migrant women in Sweden represent migrants’ culture as patriarchal and oppressive, provide an understanding of migrant women placed (or imprisoned) between modernity and tradition, and consider migrant women as recipients of benefits rather than contributors. Hegemonic discourses on migrant women are also framed by Eurocentric arrogance (Razack, 2004) shaped by the conviction that Sweden, with its gender equality ideology, opened through the provision of paid labour a path towards the empowerment of migrant women.
The creation of the category of migrant women at the core of Swedish state migration and integration policies has been explored by a number of scholars. Knocke (1991) identified the creation of the category of migrant women as a ‘problem to be solved’ through state institutional strategies, which Ålund (1991) referred to as the culturalisation of social problems. Mulinari and Lundqvist (2020) investigated these constructions in different historical periods, crudely outlining three projects from Swedish government documents regarding the construction of the category of migrant women: migrant women were identified as a problem during social democratic hegemony, as a burden during the neoliberal shift in the late eighties, and as a threat post-9/11. Economic historian Paulina de los Reyes (2022) revealed the contradictory discourses framing migrant women as workers and mothers in Swedish policies.
Although notions of cultural difference between Swedish and migrants are present in the first period, they are framed within an expanding welfare state inspired by the social democratic ideology of equality, social justice and solidarity with migrants and their families. In the 1960s and 1970s, the racialisation of migrant labour acted upon a classification system regulated through the modernity/tradition paradigm, framed through an organisational model of exploitative racism and subordinated inclusion that targeted both migrant women and migrant men. Migrant women were inscribed within a specific construction of difference, a social policy problem to be solved by the social democratic welfare state. Despite their participation in paid work, the category of migrant women during this period is represented in Swedish official documents as backwards, traditional, and isolated in their homes, culturally different from ‘Swedish women’ and therefore difficult to include in the Swedish state’s gender equality project.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal ideologies, which focused on individuals, employability, and freedom of choice, challenged social-democratically framed multiculturalism and provided a new agenda of diversity management, transforming ‘ethnic culture’ into a market commodity. Public debates focused largely on fantasies surrounding the perceived burden and the impressive expenditures that migrant women on sick leave created for the Swedish welfare state. The increasing rates of ill health among migrant women were ‘understood’ by academic scholarship and media as migrants’ resistance to the demands of work within a transforming labour market´. It was their ‘traditional culture’ rather than their hard-working conditions that explained their poor health, the long periods of sick leave, and early retirement. Culture – or rather the culture of the other – is established as an explanatory model through the introduction of terms such as cultural distance and cultural conflict, present in all government documents, mainstream academia, and public discourse.
Although exploitative racism has been the hegemonic form of gendered racism, intersecting with racial capitalist exploitation, the success in the 2022 elections of the ethno-nationalist political party Sweden Democrats, with 20% electoral support, indicates a shift towards the idea of migrant women being a threat to Swedish society and thus a shift from exploitative to exclusionary racism. In Sweden, exclusionary racism is often founded on a classification system based on the category of race, emphasising the threat of the ‘other’ gender culture (the criminalisation of migrants as dangerous and violent men) and attributing patriarchy to the others’ cultures. The shift towards racial neoliberalism and exclusionary racism has been framed by notions of securitisation in Sweden, as elsewhere. It is a constant and systematic manufacturing of differences framed through demands for assimilation. Exclusionary racism has not only become hegemonic but has also installed an emotional regime through which these differences are acted upon and have turned vulgar, vicious, and aggressive.
Despite shifts in policies, there is a strong continuity: working-class migrant women remain a regular army of labour that can be consistently relied upon for diverse forms of precarious work, particularly service and care work. However, the knowledge and skills that make migrant women employable care workers are denied by Swedish authorities and institutions in their roles as mothers. Perhaps this is the main characteristic of Swedish racial capitalism: migrant women transformed into ‘good’ care workers while systematically being challenged, questioned, and contested in their ability to care for their own children.
Viewing these processes through the lens of racial capitalism allows for an understanding of the changing role of the state in the creation and establishment of racialised labour. This also provides an analytical frame through which to identify the heterogeneity of racialised social relations from regimes of subordinated inclusion to exclusionary and even necropolitical regimes.
4.3 Racial Capitalism and Gendered Exploitative Racism
Central to the understanding of racial capitalism is the notion that racial logic dictates and informs the value of gendered labour. The labour of migrant women is performed on the margins of Swedish society but is at the centre of the reproduction of Swedish racial capitalism.
Complying with colonialism (Keskinen et al., 2012) identifies the specificity of the Swedish colonial experience, which includes Sweden’s economic interest in the slave trade and settler colonialism towards the indigenous population of the Sami people. Today, the Swedish racial regime ensures the continuity of these forms of racism with the construction of others through the race-migration nexus (Erel et al., 2015).
Diverse types of racism are entangled with one another and target different populations. We have (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2017, 2022), operationalised racism through the concepts of exclusionary, exploitative and caring racism, as three differential organisational modes that coexist in different constellations and hierarchies, forging a specific Swedish race regime. Exploitative racism operates through a process of racialisation that legitimises the capitalist production of profit. Exclusionary racism operates through violent boundary making, and its extreme form is the destruction and annihilation of the ‘other’. Caring racism is framed by these diverse forms of racism but acts upon the ideologies of love (for ‘our own’) and of care for others through the legitimation of the need for coercion and repression toward those ‘others’ in need of care.
In our study of working-class women from Greece (Tzimoula & Mulinari, 2020) who had migrated to Sweden in the late 1960s, racism was experienced in a visceral and embodied manner, and the lack of societal public recognition of their suffering reinforced the levels of pain and bodily discomfort that we could identify in our research subjects.
I started working in a factory where they made typewriters. There, I experienced the first big tragedy of my life. My hand got caught in a machine and pieces of my two fingers were ripped off (showing the injured hand). Then, reality hit me. I left a rather good life to go to a country I knew nothing about and became an invalid. I felt useless, invalid – all sorts of things. One could say that it was the first mark that Sweden left on me. (Daphne)
We also identified the reiteration of some arguments, such as ‘It is their country; we are only guests here’ and ‘It is normal; we are guests here’. The research subjects’ experiences of racialised gendered labour migration, particularly the level of over-exploitation of their labour, are located within the functioning of ‘normal’ capitalism. Racial capitalist accumulation depends parasitically on the extraction of migrant women’s labour – work that is essential to economic production in a capitalist society but rendered non-valuable.
It is from the artwork of many of these women’s daughters that the experiences of migrant women are illuminated today, and the connection between racial capitalism and reproductive racism is explored. The 2022 art exhibition ‘MAMI: AMA: MÖDRAR’ at the Tensta Art Museum is a declaration of love for mothers and the maternal work. An art historian, writer, and participant in the exhibition, Macarena Dusant (2022) presented a participatory installation titled ‘Altar for Our Migrated Mothers’ (‘Altare till våra migrerade mödrar’), in which visitors with mothers who migrated were encouraged to leave a tribute or a testimony about their mothers.
Filmmaker Jonelle Twum’s (2022) poetic short film A Mother’s Body is about the mental and physical burdens of migrant women who labour on the margins of Swedish society. It is an intimate portrayal of two hotel cleaners from a daughter’s perspective. While the women perform their daily work as cleaners in a hotel, the daughter reflects on how their job affects their bodies and relationships with time. The women navigate and negotiate the demands of strenuous labour with experience, precision and beauty. These artworks illustrate the experience of being daughters of women migrant workers stigmatised in their two conditions: as workers and as migrant mothers.
Journalist and writer Alexandra Pascalidou (2009) revealed the working conditions of her parents from her perspective as the daughter of working-class migrants from Greece:
Mom and Dad worked long hours. They would be tired when they got home. Mama got a job as a cleaner. Every morning, the alarm clock would ring at six o’clock. Mama would prepare breakfast, sandwiches, and milk before going to work. (2009, p. 12)
My dad has been cleaning windows for twenty years. Most people can’t last that long. The shoulders usually wear out after a few years. It’s a shame that cleaning windows isn’t a sport, as Dad would’ve won many gold medals. (2009, p. 24)
Pascalidou ‘remembered’ the time her mother woke up and fed the family before going to work. The reader sees her mother moving from unpaid reproductive work at home to paid reproductive work in the public sphere. She ‘remembers’ tired parents coming home after long hours of paid work. The topic of the body, or the deterioration and suffering of the body, such as mothers´ bodies, that are tired after long hours of paid work, is present in many of these artistic interventions.
These are three of the many illustrations through which migrant daughters act in the field of cultural production and reveal the experiences of their migrant mothers as working mothers. The invisibility of migrant women as workers is reproduced in the lack of collective societal memory, in the politics of amnesia in acknowledging their contribution to the establishment of the welfare state.
The commodification of social reproduction is a branch of the economy that is nonviable for relocation to the Global South. The following quotation is from a Social Democratic Minister for Gender Equality and Integration, which illustrates a general agreement about the skills and the usual position of migrant women in the labour market – in low-paid care and service work.
We need a growing service sector. Not least, I’m thinking of those who come here as refugees and who can make bread, sew, care for children and clean. They should be able to find an outlet for their skills and, in addition, be paid for it. (Jens Orback, Dagens Nyheter, 26/10/2004)
In the wake of several welfare reforms by the end of the 2000s, including tax deductions on household services, a different discourse emerged. In 2008, a tax deduction for housework was introduced as a gender equality policy measure, with the following argument:
Tax deductions for housework create more equal conditions for women and men to combine family life with working life. Women decrease their paid work for unpaid work at home to a larger extent than men do. If women are given better possibilities to reorganise their time by shifting their efforts from unpaid work at home to paid work in the labour market, their possibilities for higher salaries will expand as well as gender equality in working life. (SOU, 2008/2009, p. 39)
The 2008 RUT (i.e. Swedish Tax Deduction for Domestic Services) reform provides an example of a family/gender policy framework through premises radically different from those inspired by the social-democratic welfare gender equality project. This is a policy that allows households to purchase cleaning, maintenance and laundry services at a tax-subsidised rate and that exacerbates class, gendered, and racialised social relations (Kvist & Overud, 2015).
Participating in the labour market under equal conditions must not be achieved (as in earlier decades) through the presence of men in care work but through the introduction of the category of migrant women (and their bodies) as the fundamental node in the creation of ‘gender equality’ in families in Sweden (Yazdanpanah, 2013). While privileged Swedish families are the core of state policies on gender equality, ‘migrant families’ are the core of state policies of disruption through racist migrant and refugee policies that separate and split up families.
Historically and currently, Swedish wealth depends on the transference of value from racialised peripheries, while Swedish welfare depends on the transference of value from racialised gendered labour.
4.4 Racial Capitalism and Reproductive Racism
In feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins’ (1998) ‘It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race and Nation’, she explored how the traditional family ideal functions as a nod through which to explore intersectionality in the United States, identifying specific connections between family as a gendered system of social organisation, racial ideas and practices, and notions of national identity and belonging. Collins argued that returning to ‘family values’ sets the stage (through racial meanings) for reintroducing a logic of eugenics that could be applied to adolescent pregnancy, women’s poverty, street crimes, and other social issues.
The film Sami Blood (Kemell, 2016) shows the experiences of indigenous children through the story of two sisters, revealing the suffering of their different paths, one towards racist assimilation, the other towards racist exclusion.
Two little girls, who attend a boarding school (Nomad school) are holding hands but will be separated by Swedish settler colonialism leading to two distinctive journeys. The eldest sister wants to learn to speak Swedish, she wants to be ‘Swedish’, while the other sister wants to go back to her mother, her family, and her Sámpi community. In one emotionally conflicting scene, the children at the school are instructed in Swedish and admonished for speaking Sámi. The eldest of the girls changes her Sámpi name of Elle Marja to a Swedish name, Christina, which is the name of her teacher.
In the film, researchers from the Swedish State Institute of Race Biology often visit the school. One of the most powerful scenes is when the researchers visit the school to gather ‘anthropological data’ through body measurements and force Elle Marja to undress. She uses the Swedish language, which she has mastered, to ask: What are you going to do? Nobody answers her questions, and she is violently commanded to undress. There are thousands of naked photographs of Sámi children.
The film does not offer an easy boundary between the path of assimilation (Elle Marja) and that of resistance, which is the path taken by Elle Marja’s little sister. In the words of the film director Amanda Kemell, who has a Sámpi background:
I made the film as a declaration of love to this older generation, to those who stayed and those who left. I think both choices are hard ones to make. You have to be strong to leave, but you have to be strong to stay. (quoted in Heeney, 2017, p. 2)
As with many other indigenous postcolonial-inspired cultural productions that have emerged in Sweden in the last decades, the film recovers and reveals the experiences that were edited out of the Swedish hegemonic narrative of gender equality, nationhood, and belonging. It portrays how Swedish settler colonialism›s assimilation policies separate, fracture, and destroy the fundamental relationships between mothers and children and between children and communities (Stine, 2023).
In Sweden, sterilisation was an accepted practice until 1972. Studies on Swedish eugenic policies that target racialised populations, such as the Sami and Roma people are extensive (Broberg & Tyden, 2005). These state practices were framed and interrelated in government investigations with the demand on Swedish women to reproduce the ‘Swedish folk tribe’ (see, e.g., SOU, 1938:57, p. 99) and in which women’s reproductive role was widely debated nationally (Kling, 2010). In Denmark, several thousand Greenlandic women had IUD s inserted into them without their knowledge in the 1960s and 1970s. They were never informed about the procedure or given the opportunity to say no; the youngest girls were only 13 years old (Lindberg, 2022).
In her pioneering book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts (1997) analyses the systematic attack against Afro-American women as mothers and, among other things, through stereotypical images of Black ‘welfare queens’ who supposedly had children just to get access to welfare. In Sweden, reproductive and exclusionary racism is at the core of the creation of migrant families and migrant mothers as harmful for their children; from the notion of migrant mothers ‘cheating’ the welfare system and migrant mothers being committed to dangerous practices of honour killing and female circumcision.
Following the neoliberal shift in the late 1980s, the establishment of migrant women as problematic mothers whose traditional values hinder the integration of their children into Swedish society was established in Swedish governmental documents. While the idea of ‘cultural distance’ obscured racism and explained their unemployment as a lack of cultural skills within a complex labour market, the ‘cultural conflict’ paradigm framed in academic, political, and media discourses represented (and acted upon) migrant families as being characterised by violent forms of sexism, with cruel patriarchal men and passive submissive mothers.
Here in Sweden, the immigrant woman finds that women have a different position and that she does not need to find herself ignored and beaten. (SOU, 1982:18)
In an open society, freedom of choice is found in the individual. As the pressure from one’s own becomes smaller and the borders between groups weaken, the influence of the majority culture becomes strong. For individuals born in Sweden of migrant parents (or those who migrated to Sweden as a child), there is no choice other than the Swedish option. However, for the same individual in an ethnically repressive society, there is no choice other than the ‘ethnic option’. (SOU, 1984:55)
A more tangible way through which generational conflict evolves is influenced by Swedish values and patterns of living. Living patterns differ from country to country and from generation to generation in Sweden. However, in this case, it is natural that the risk of cultural collisions is greater when the domestic population meets immigrants from countries in which the general cultural pattern largely deviates from Swedish values. (‘Immigration and Minority Policy’ in SOU, 1984:58)
The word ‘value’ appeared more frequently in the 1990s as a codeword for ontological difference, often without further explanation. It functions by emphasising differences, equating nation-states with ‘national’ cultures and marginalising the diversity of cultural backgrounds in Sweden into a monolithic confrontation with migrant culture, in which Swedish values seem so obvious for those engaged in producing these governmental documents that no explanation of what they may be is deemed necessary. No evidence is needed to argue for the positive qualities of Swedish culture and its values, as well as for the negative qualities of migrant cultures, particularly of migrant mothers. It should be noted that Swedish citizens have ‘values’, while migrants have ‘cultures’, a discourse that paves the way for the establishment of caring racism in a number of civil society organisations and state institutions.
Caring racism and rescue narratives were at the core of many governmental reports during the 1980s and 1990s, and the desire to save the other from dangerous patriarchies was established. These (caring) racist policies act upon the need to establish municipality ‘integration’ projects for the administration, management, and warehousing of these ‘problematic’ mothers. At the same time, feminist-inspired concerns about gender equality began to be mobilised and appropriated for ethnoracist arguments in the successful establishment of migrant men as a threat to Swedish gender equality in general and to Swedish women in particular (Sager & Mulinari, 2018).
Schultz (2023) introduced the Malthusian matrix to understand how class-selective and racist hierarchies in population narratives are combined with gendered policies of reproductive bodies. Distinguishing between the birth of desirable and undesirable people, an upward redistributive family policy in Germany promoted births within the privileged middle class. The concept of reproductive racism is also central in Siddiqui’s (2021) analysis, which asserts that ‘native’ women’s reproductive capacities are incentivised for nationalist ends, whereas these same rights (to have children and family life) for minority migrant women are restricted while their labour is hyper-exploited because it is essential to care for the young, sick, and elderly of the nation under ‘advanced’ capitalism. In Sweden, women who are the target of racialisation processes as ‘non-white’ and foreign-born suffer more complications and birth injuries and are also at a higher risk of dying during or after childbirth (Bradby et al., 2023).
The following quote summarises the debate and policies in the city of Gothenburg in 2023.
The recent debate about family planning has been about limiting childbearing among foreign-born people in vulnerable areas, including Gothenburg, and about not having more children than one can support. (Larsson, 2022)
These policies are supported by both the Social Democrats and the right-wing parties. On one side, clear-cut efforts are made to regulate specific groups of women’s reproductive capacities; on the other side, policies are aimed at decreasing the number of migrant women’s children. For example, the ethnonationalist party, the Sweden Democrats wants the multi-child allowance to be converted into a ‘multi-child deduction’ so as not to favour large migrant families, while the Moderates’ proposal aims to change the criminal code so that the parents of children who commit crimes suffer the consequences (Mulinari, 2024). In Denmark, an agreement that can be concluded between parents and municipalities is called ‘Forældrepålæg’. It enables municipalities to withdraw subsidies from Danish parents with migrant backgrounds if their children commit crimes.
Exclusionary racism and reproductive racism are also mirrored in discourses that argue that ‘people should not have more children than they themselves can afford’ and in policy proposals that target migrant women’s reproductive capacities. These policies function through two axes: (1) too many children = resistance to integrate into the labour market and (2) too many children (who cannot be controlled by these mothers) = too many criminals in the future.
Racist policies are also implemented in two ways: denial of migrant women’s right to bear as many children as they want and the establishment of specific and differentiated social rights for migrant (parents). Blood/genetic tests to define family bonds (Helen, 2014) among refugees are also an established practice today.
Sociologist Minoo Alinia (2020) shows that the Swedish government’s policy document on the prevention of men’s violence against women systematically and consistently excludes the analysis of racism and its effects on migrant women’s lives. While race is obscured in official documents, differences between those identified as belonging to the nation and the “Others” are systematically emphasised in establishing that migrant cultures are extremely patriarchal.
The Moderate election manifesto of 2022 does not equate migrant mothers with security but highlights that security – understood through the need for repressive measures – is needed to attain safety. A new racial welfare regime is rapidly growing, based on the success of authoritarian and neofascist political visions.
Honour cultures, organised crime, money laundering, and systematic grant fraud. These are some of the things the criminal clans that have established themselves in Sweden today engage in. There are now around 40 criminal clans in Sweden that have extensive violent capital and stated ambitions to compete with the Swedish state for control. The clan provides its own system of justice, protection against external enemies and a social safety net for its members. In these families, children are brought up early in an unacceptable growing-up environment with an early marked criminal path and a life in conflict with ordinary society. (Moderaterna, 2022, p. 26)
In the manifesto, a specific chapter is dedicated to crime, which states, ‘So we sort out the safety and judiciary’ (‘Så får vi ordning på tryggheten och rättssystemet’). The narratives of women’s safety legitimise the need for law and order. This need is created through the location of patriarchy (and violence) outside Sweden – violence ‘imported’ to Sweden by migrant men.
5 Conclusion
Racial capitalism is a concept that has become central to contemporary radical movements, from Black Lives Matter and the Black feminist prison abolition movement to movements for climate justice. With love, care and analytical stringency, Cedric Robinson offers through the concept a powerful narrative of the Black radical tradition and its ability to repeatedly reconstruct itself as a collective and imagine and create practices of epistemic resistance.
The concept connects with diverse forms of thinking about social justice from the standpoint of categories of people and places historically excluded from the notion of theory.
Robinson’s work underlines the subterranean forms of (Black) resistance at the crossroads between spoken silence and storytelling that have framed the survival of Black communities from slaves to racialised exploited labour. The concept invites enquiry and exploration and may function as an analytical tool for decolonising knowledge in Eurocentric academia, providing a working agenda for visions and practices of epistemic resistance.
In writing this chapter, I was impressed with how much knowledge on social justice that challenges mainstream social theory has been produced in Sweden over the last few decades. In these efforts thinking together and through the Black radical tradition has played a fundamental role. This knowledge is emancipatory in character, as it not only questions epistemic injustices but also provides arenas for rethinking the Swedish social formation and its inscription in colonialism, imperialism and racism. The strength of this emancipatory knowledge production is that it is pluralistic in voice and agency. It identifies the centrality of racialised groups as historical subjects in their struggle for social justice. It moves fluidly from the academe to the arts and back and forth in dialogues with antiracist social movements for social justice.
Acknowledgements
This research was possible thanks to FORMAS 2020-01845 & VR 2020-04164.
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