Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Reproductive Racial Capitalism? Why Now?
A concept increasingly used in analysing the intersection between class, race, and gender is racial capitalism. While rooted in Marxist debates in and about South Africa’s apartheid regime (Levenson & Paret, 2023), it is Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) that, through critical dialogue with several social justice movements, has become the general reference point today.
We bring racial capitalism to bear on the archetype of welfare capitalism – the Swedish model, referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’. We do this with the aim of qualifying and challenging some institutionalised understandings of welfare capitalism represented by Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Finland – two welfare states with small populations in the northern peripheries of the Global North.
This edited volume explores the relevance of the concept of racial capitalism in analysing ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ (Keskinen et al., 2009; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012) in general and, more specifically, for an analysis of the Swedish model (Ålund et al., 2017; Ålund & Schierup, 1991). In the last decade, there has been an upsurge in research, spurred by the republication of Robinson’s (1983) book in 2000 and 2020. Much of this work, however, has had a strong Anglo-US inflection. Few studies have focused on continental Europe or the Nordic region. In this edited volume, the focus is on theoretically inspired and empirically grounded analyses of Sweden in the Nordic context, exploring the Swedish capitalist welfare model from a perspective that places processes of racialisation and racial regimes at centre stage.