Economic Democracy against Racial Capitalism: Seeding Freedom *

In the mid-1990s, as neoliberalism was consolidating its global reach, Ellen Meiksins Wood's Democracy against Capitalism offered a trenchant account of liberal democracy's failure to extend democratic voice and representation into the economic realm. ¹ Picking up the mantle, Ferreras's proposal for economic bicameralism offers a powerful and timely vision for advancing economic democracy. ² Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many working people delivering “essential” goods and services have been subjected to unsafe conditions and deprived of the means to provide for themselves and their families. ³ Problems related to corporate power and control have become apparent in multiple ways, including systems that tightly surveil workers and block their ability to engage in collective action. ⁴ Yet, recent times have also seen historically significant labor mobilizations in the United States, whether it is workers demanding hazard pay or forming unions at companies like Amazon and Starbucks that were previously considered “unorganizable.” ⁵ These developments reflect a grassroots energy—still mostly latent—that might coalesce around the kind of proposal Ferreras puts forward.

Alongside and intertwined with struggles for worker rights and economic justice, recent times have seen a cascade of uprisings contesting structural racism across different arenas. In the United States, the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others to name prompted a new wave of movement activity asserting the intrinsic value of Black lives, set against a pandemic that disproportionately impacted the well-being and economic security of Black communities. ⁶ Building on years of movement building at the intersection of economic and racial justice, ⁷ the Movement for Black Lives has been interlinked with the Fight for 15 movement to raise the minimum wage and other struggles for economic fairness, ⁸ and workers of color have been at the forefront of many recent labor organizing victories. ⁹ Helping to frame these efforts is a growing body of work on “racial capitalism” that offers lenses for understanding both the extraordinary oppressions confronting many workers of color and their positioning at the leading edge of movements to effect change in the world of work and other arenas.

In conversation with Ferreras’s conception of economic bicameralism, the current essay makes the case for a more direct confrontation between conceptions of economic democracy and the harsh realities of racial capitalism. In particular, it considers how efforts to expand power and voice for workers must contend with the racial hierarchy that marks the socioeconomic division of labor and the related use of racial distinctions to thwart labor solidarity. Focusing on the American context, the argument draws inspiration from the work and vision of two iconic figures in the unfinished struggle for Black liberation, W. E. B. Du Bois and Fannie Lou Hamer. After recapping core elements of Ferreras’s proposal, the article briefly examines the historical evolution of racial capitalism, starting with its roots in slavery and conquest. It then considers how movements agitating for greater worker power have intervened within this landscape. Against this backdrop, it draws lessons for how economic bicameralism might fit within a broader set of struggles that challenge racial capitalism as it exists today.

Ferreras’s Proposal in Context

Ferreras’s proposal springs from a concern with the tension between capitalism and democracy. This tension has become all the more apparent in recent years, with corporations wielding ever-growing influence on a global scale and a billionaire class increasingly able to impose its will on the rest of humanity. It is long-running, however, as Ferreras points out, embedded within the underlying structure of capitalist firms. Capital investors, and those whom they hire to run things, hold virtually all of the institutionalized authority within firms. ¹⁰ For those selling their labor power to someone else in order to earn a living, democracy fails to apply in important ways once they cross the literal or figural company doorstep. Drawing inspiration from previous democratic transitions in the formal political arena, Ferreras proposes economic bicameralism as a means of addressing this imbalance: a chamber of “labor investors” should be constituted as coequal with a “chamber” of capital investors, both engaged in setting the firm's direction and formulating its key decisions.

Economic bicameralism is a pragmatist formulation in the Deweyan sense: it seeks to deepen democracy in ways that are responsive to the evident limitations and potentialities of contemporary conditions building a bridge from where we are now to a possible future. ¹¹ Ferreras acknowledges the important measures of power and voice that unions have achieved. Even at the upper bound of the influence they wield at the enterprise level, however, bolstered by institutions such as codetermination, they remain positioned as a junior partner to capital. Economic bicameralism pushes labor's role beyond this. But it stops short of pressing—in the immediate term at least—for full worker ownership and control of the sort seen in worker cooperatives. Ferreras sees economic bicameralism as potentially paving a path in that direction. However, her conception seeks to respond to conditions in which a relatively small number of people hold much of the investment capital and corresponding corporate governance rights. In that context, making labor coequal to capital would mark a meaningful step forward.

Ferreras’s discussion is focused squarely on shifting authority and control within firms. But she notes the importance of transforming the larger environment in which they function through government action and social movement (especially labor movement) organizing, both generally and in ways that lay the ground for economic bicameralism to take root. The point bears emphasis if we are to think about democratizing firms in relation to larger aims of expanding voice and accountability within the economy. For some key thinkers on economic democracy, transforming the structure of firms is more or less the entire enterprise, as it were. ¹² The argument advanced here suggests that democratizing firms must ultimately be linked to wider shifts in the deployment of state and social power, or risk becoming yet another project coopted to empower firms at the expense of broader democratic accountability.

More specifically, the discussion below considers this two-pronged endeavor—democratizing firms and democratizing the larger economies in which they sit—within a context of structural racism. “Progressive actors in history have fought to emancipate colonies, slaves, ethnic groups, or women,” Ferreras writes. “Now it is time to emancipate workers.” Emancipation from legacies of slavery, conquest, and legalized gender subordination remain unfinished projects, however. Ferreras would surely agree with this. Wood, though, rather minimized the relevance of “identity” to the core project of democratizing the economy in Democracy against Capitalism and other work, worried that a focus on race and gender by forces on the left would obscure and eclipse class-based mobilization. ¹³ Unfortunately, racial politics have indeed upended class solidarity, but Wood and other Left critics of identity politics have often lost sight of the vastly more important set of mechanisms that are at play: the ways in which racism has shaped class formation and consciousness, and capitalist dynamics more broadly. ¹⁴ Any project to advance economic democracy must challenge racial capitalism specifically or fall into the same old traps.

Racial Capitalism in America: A Short Sketch

Racial capitalism, at least in the way most use the term, does not refer to a particular type of capitalism or a narrowly bounded set of practices within capitalism. ¹⁵ Rather, as Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy note, it is a broad frame for understanding how racism and racialized differentiation have generated economic segmentation and political division, centrally shaping the development of capitalism globally. ¹⁶ Importantly, it also provides a set of resources for contextualizing the evolution of racism, showing how social difference has been racialized in the service of capital accumulation and related agglomerations of political power.

In a foundational text, Cedric Robinson asserts that “the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was . . . not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into racial ones.” ¹⁷ There are two key takeaways from the line of argument encapsulated in this brief passage. First, racialized differentiation could proceed from various kinds of distinctions—be they racial, ethnic, or national—and take varying forms across different geographies. The point was to understand the common threads in how these distinctions became reified and mobilized to serve the interests of economic and political elites. Second, as the European project radiated outward, utilizing racialized distinctions to justify colonization and transatlantic slavery, it rendered its brand of racial capitalism global. ¹⁸ Today, racialized distinctions may be more or less salient across different settings, but we all inhabit a global system bearing the imprints of that project.

Charting the workings of racial capitalism within the United States, Cheryl Harris unpacks how whiteness itself has functioned as a form of property, serving as a basis for exclusion from fundamental citizenship and ownership rights. “The racialization of identity and the racial subordination of Blacks and Native Americans provided the ideological basis for slavery and conquest,” Harris notes. ¹⁹ “Although the systems of oppression of Blacks and Native Americans differed in form—the former involving the seizure and appropriation of labor, the latter entailing the seizure and appropriation of land—undergirding both was a racialized conception of property implemented by force and ratified by law.” ²⁰ These forms of extraction also figured centrally in global dynamics: enslaved Black people harvesting cotton on lands appropriated from Indigenous nations supplied the raw material for England's industrialization, feeding its drive to the summit of the world system. As Walter Johnson put it in a piece reflecting on Robinson's legacy, “There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.” ²¹

Harris’s account captures key mechanisms of racial capitalism. ²² One is the exploitation of labor by capital, a core concern and point of departure in Ferreras’s discussion of economic bicameralism. Robinson, Harris, and others have shown how racial distinctions have structured the terms of exploitation, which is most starkly evident in the case of slavery but continues through the racially differentiated valuation of work in contemporary labor markets. ²³ A second is the expropriation of personhood and land that has laid the ground for capital accumulation. Long after the original sins of slavery and conquest, expropriation continues through multiple forms of racialized dehumanization and practices that extract profit from communities of color while denying them the means for accumulating assets, often saddling them with debt. ²⁴ Building on recent contributions to the literature on racial capitalism, we can add to these another mechanism—marginalization—by which some are deemed surplus to the requirements of capital accumulation. ²⁵ Racism looms large in who is rendered expendable in this manner, as evident in the racially inflected application and impact of austerity politics and the ways in which recent economic restructuring, though widely felt, often affects employment and economic security in communities of color most acutely. ²⁶

In foregrounding and teasing out the racialized character of these mechanisms, a racial capitalism framework carries important implications for understanding how class hierarchies get formed and maintained. Marx made note of racialized superexploitation, particularly in his more journalistic writings. However, as Julian Go points out, racialized differentiation did not assume a central role in his general theory of capital (or in the work of most others taking his framework as a point of departure), ²⁷ which became the crux of Robinson's critique of orthodox Marxism. ²⁸ Observing how English and Irish workers were coordinating some of their organizing efforts in the late eighteenth century, including as part of the Chartist movement, Robinson saw the manner in which this incipient class solidarity was overwhelmed by English nationalism as more than a mere side note. ²⁹ For Robinson, this racialized cleavage was important to understanding why capitalists in that theater did not get more of a run for their money. More broadly, racism was crucial to grasping both the socioeconomics of class stratification and the politics of how challenges to capitalist domination were suppressed.

Long pre-dating contemporary discussions around racial capitalism, W. E. B. Du Bois captured this political dynamic as part of a stunningly original analysis of the period following Emancipation in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. ³⁰ Born in Massachusetts in 1868, five years following the end of slavery, Du Bois forged a career as the consummate scholar activist. The first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and a prolific author of several pathbreaking volumes, Du Bois was also a founder of the NAACP and penned influential political and social commentary as the first editor of its magazine, the Crisis. In earlier writings, most notably The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois emphasized the role of a Black elite—the “talented tenth”—in spearheading Black progress. ³¹ As he continued to grapple with the reasons why progress toward racial equality had foundered, however, his gaze shifted more and more toward the struggles of poor and working-class Black people to win civil and social rights. ³² In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois framed the mass refusal of many enslaved Black people to continue working during the Civil War period as a historic general strike, noting that they had also managed to draw in some white workers interested in resisting the planter class. But, despite some notable achievements during the Reconstruction era, the potential of such multiracial organizing to build a more radically egalitarian society remained mostly unrealized in this period and afterwards. In Du Bois’s evocative turn of phrase, this could be attributed in significant measure to “a public and psychological wage’ of whiteness that compensated for the hardship many white workers faced themselves, blinding them to the humanity of workers of color and the interests they shared in common. ³³

David Roediger builds from Du Bois’s formulation to delve further into how the “wages of whiteness” developed historically vis-à-vis slavery and evolving conceptions of freedom. Indenture and other “gradations of unfreedom” experienced by white workers as late as the eighteenth century led many not to distinguish their own circumstances all that sharply from those of enslaved Black people, Roediger argues. ³⁴ By the first half of the nineteenth century, however, most white workers had exited indenture and occupational positions such as domestic service that placed them in closer structural proximity to the enslaved. Although there were currents of labor republicanism that challenged “wage slavery,” ³⁵ large segments of the white working class came to jointly embrace “free” labor and whiteness as markers of their superiority. By the time Emancipation was declared in 1865, large-scale damage to multiracial solidarity had already been done. ³⁶ Thus, when the Populist party started moving an agenda for redistribution and robust social rights in the late nineteenth century, white elites in the South (where the party had its strongest base) were able to cleave its farm-labor coalition along racial lines, halting its progress. ³⁷

Several recent contributions have underscored the critical importance of “gendering racial capitalism,” as Shauna Sweeney puts it. ³⁸ In dialogue with feminist accounts focusing on paid and unpaid reproductive labor, ³⁹ some of the most generative work on racial capitalism has unpacked how racism and sexism converge in shaping the devaluation and invisibility of women whose labor is ultimately essential for social reproduction and the functioning of capitalist economies. ⁴⁰ As Gargi Bhattacharyya has observed, those performing these functions—including direct care work—are often left struggling to reproduce their own subsistence, making them all the more susceptible to exploitation. Confluences of racism and sexism with capitalist domination also produce a range of harms that defy narrowly economistic conceptions. Given the sexual violation of Black women and exploitation of their reproductive capacities under slavery, Saidiya Hartman has shown that categories of “labor” and “labor exploitation” and limited formulations of “reproductive labor” fail to capture fully the harms that resonate in slavery's “afterlife,” marking contemporary perceptions of Black women and their ongoing struggles for agency and recognition. ⁴¹

In the United States amid the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly two-thirds of those in healthcare support occupations (a set of job titles in which Black women and Latinas are highly overrepresented) doubted whether they could afford healthcare themselves if seriously ill, and two in five said they had lost income—both figures that were far higher than the average for workers in general. At the same time, despite everything we know about women of color forming the backbone of the direct care workforce, Black women and Latinas were more likely than other groups to report that their own family care responsibilities had forced them to take time off from work during the pandemic. And, in line with a growing literature on the mistreatment and misrecognition that Black women encounter within healthcare systems, more than half—far more than any other group—said they would fear substandard treatment due to their race if they become seriously ill. ⁴² For Susan Moore, Rana Zoe Mungin, and too many other Black women who suffered and died from COVID-19, such fears were tragically borne out, calling to mind Ruth Wilson Gilmore's conception of racism as “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” ⁴³

Movements for Worker Power and the Struggle for Racial Equality

Racial capitalism deals deathly, multilayered oppression; it also engenders incredible, creative resistance—a duality embodied in the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Born in 1919 in Mississippi, two generations removed from slavery, Hamer was raised in a sharecropping family. She described being tricked by a white landowner into starting to pick cotton at the age of six, and she had stopped formal schooling in order to support her family by age twelve. Weathering poverty and deprivation through her childhood and even once she became a noted activist, Hamer lived the economic consequences of the stalled Reconstruction efforts documented by Du Bois. ⁴⁴ Like many other Black women of her time, she also suffered the profound indignity and loss of forced sterilization, her own reproductive capacities stripped from her by a white doctor who removed her uterus without her consent. ⁴⁵

Once declaring in a speech alongside Malcolm X, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Hamer was a powerful orator and brilliant strategist who channeled her pain into a startling range of activism and advocacy. She is best known for her trailblazing work to extend voting rights for Black people in the South and for challenging racist exclusion within Mississippi's Democratic Party as part of her work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization she helped found. Hamer also consistently intervened in struggles for basic subsistence. Indeed, she was highly skeptical of political formations that failed to directly connect to and concern themselves with these struggles. In the 1960s, in parallel to her organizing with the MFCP, Hamer was closely involved with the work of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Union (MFDU), a movement of poor, mostly Black workers confronting exploitative conditions across different sectors. The MFDU organized strikes and other actions and mobilized mutual aid, including relief for workers who faced employer retaliation for asserting their rights. ⁴⁶ Hamer and her family also frequently became targets because of her activism. She was shot at numerous times, brutalized by police while on her way home from a voting rights event, and saw one of her own children die from illness after “no hospital in Mississippi would treat a daughter of Fannie Hou Hamer.” ⁴⁷

Hamer's life and work call attention, among many other things, to a larger history of labor activism by Black workers and other workers of color seeking to improve their conditions, often in ways that have been intertwined with struggles for civil and social rights. Workers of color have created their own organizations, as in the case of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), an organization cofounded by labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph in 1925 to challenge the paternalistic Pullman company and give Black railway porters a real voice. ⁴⁸ They have also fought for inclusion within larger labor movements. Indeed, the BSCP played a part in this struggle, too, helping to inaugurate a period from the 1930s to the 1950s during which the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) successfully organized multiracial worker populations in factories around the country. ⁴⁹

In the postwar decades, some unions were also able to make headway in areas of the service economy where work performed disproportionately by people of color and women had been systematically devalued. The National Health Care Workers' Union, or 1199 (now 1199SEIU), which Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as his favorite union, pioneered the unionization of pharmacy and frontline hospital workers, using sit-down strikes and other civil rights–era tactics to command attention. ⁵⁰ Overall, postwar unionization across different sectors helped to advance better wages and benefits for millions of working people, bringing particular gains for Black workers. ⁵¹ And, in recent decades, even as overall union density has plummeted, some of the most significant new organizing has been in commercial cleaning, direct care, and other forms of reproductive labor (broadly defined) that are largely performed by women, people of color, and new immigrants. ⁵²

Workers of color have often confronted a particularly daunting set of challenges in organizing collectively. This has included state repression of their organizing efforts and different forms of state-sanctioned violence—for example, lynchings of Black Americans by white mobs, often condoned by local government authorities during the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century when they were a routine occurrence in the United States, not infrequently targeted Black labor activists. ⁵³ It has also involved racialized legal exclusions like those established during the New Deal era, when Southern Democrats intent on preserving conditions of racialized subjection within their spheres of influence blocked the coverage of farm workers and domestic workers under landmark labor and employment protections. ⁵⁴ And the “threat” of broad, multiracial organizing has often elicited strong countervailing actions by elected leaders. In the mid-1940s, spooked by the growing success of Black and white industrial workers seeking to unionize, a coalition including Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans passed legislation that substantially narrowed the range of tactics organized labor had at its disposal, sapping the CIO's organizing momentum. ⁵⁵

Though organized labor has often sought in various ways to challenge racial exclusion, it is worth underscoring how unions and labor leaders have also reinforced the boundary lines of racial capitalism. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, denied a charter to the California-based Japanese Mexican Labor Association (JMLA) in the mid-1890s unless the organization purged Japanese workers from its ranks—a demand that was criticized and roundly rejected by the group's Chicano branch. ⁵⁶ Through the twentieth century and still today, there are unions in the building trades and other sectors that have been complicit in excluding people of color, women, and immigrants from accessing entire segments of the labor market. ⁵⁷ Even when members of marginalized groups have made their way into union jobs, union representatives and members have too often subjected them to mistreatment, constrained their job mobility, and kept them at the edges of union decision-making processes. ⁵⁸ Bruce Nelson documents how many of the CIO unions noted for their multiracial organizing nonetheless reinforced patterns of occupational closure along racial lines, keeping workers of color out of the most highly paid jobs. ⁵⁹ And Operation Dixie, launched in 1946 to organize industrial workers in the South, ultimately stalled because of not just external factors including new legal hurdles but decisions by CIO leaders to limit the role of Black organizers and those judged too radical. ⁶⁰

In the United States and most other places, worker cooperatives have had a much smaller footprint and structural role than that of unions, which flows in part from the more direct challenge they pose to the norms of how firms are structured under capitalism. As in the case of unions, it is important to acknowledge a history of worker cooperatives that have actively participated in racial exclusion, including Depression-era garbage collection cooperatives formed by Italian immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area that permitted Black workers to become associated only as nonmembers. ⁶¹ There are also, however, important examples of racially diverse worker cooperatives that have done painstaking work to advance radical inclusion along multiple dimensions of identity, as Joan Meyers discusses in her recent book on the challenges of “managing inequality” within worker-owned firms. ⁶² And there is a rich tradition of cooperatives and other forms of mutualism created within communities facing acute social marginalization, including, in recent years, numerous domestic worker cooperatives formed by immigrant women of color still working under the shadow of New Deal–era legal exclusions. ⁶³

Jessica Gordon Nembhard documents a rich tradition of Black cooperation and mutualism forged under conditions of racial subjugation and terror. This includes Black networks of mutual aid and resistance that emerged on slave plantations and in maroon settlements created by fugitives from bondage. It also encompasses an underappreciated history of Black cooperative development in the United States. ⁶⁴ As part of documenting this history, Gordon Nembhard highlights a lesser-known work published by Du Bois in 1907, Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans, in which he catalogued 154 existing Black-owned cooperatives (including consumer, credit, producer, and transportation co-ops) and hundreds of Black-run mutual aid societies. ⁶⁵ Though not all that optimistic about prospects for further growth of Black cooperatives at the time of this study, ⁶⁶ Du Bois retained an interest in their potential. ⁶⁷ As his class analysis sharpened over the course of his career, he came to envision a role for both cooperatives and unions as part of a broader push for “industrial democracy.” “The disfranchisement . . . of the mass of workers . . . is the most vital disfranchisement in the world,” he wrote in an article in the Crisis in 1930. ⁶⁸

Hamer's Freedom Farms Cooperative is an historically significant example within the tradition of Black cooperation and mutualism mapped by Du Bois and Gordon Nembhard. Recognizing, as Monica White puts it, the ways that her community was being “starve[d] . . . into compliance with the racial hierarchy,” Hamer established Freedom Farms as an organizational complex that would help people meet their basic needs. ⁶⁹ Founded in 1969, a few years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the organizational complex employed dozens of people in cooperative enterprises and clerical roles, administered a cooperative pig bank that helped to provide food and financial support to many families in the area, and anchored the development of hundreds of affordable housing units. ⁷⁰ In other words, it addressed multiple mechanisms of racial capitalism, from racialized labor exploitation, to the ongoing denial of land and home ownership, to the ways political and economic elites in the state of Mississippi continued to force Black people to the margins of economic and social life even once key measures of formal political equality had been enshrined.

Informed by Black power and community control movements in the latter part of her career, Hamer saw Freedom Farms as a vehicle for advancing self-sufficiency through mutualism and cooperation. ⁷¹ Priscilla McCutcheon notes that the project was inextricably bound up with Hamer's own experience of exploitation as a sharecropper. It sought to reclaim an agrarian landscape that Hamer and others in her community had experienced as a site of violence and harm, drawing on skills she had developed as an expert agricultural producer to forge a place of refuge from the twin evils of racial oppression and economic compulsion. ⁷² Though beset by practical challenges and relatively short-lived, the project's capacious vision of seeding freedom in the face of racial capitalism continues to inspire—today, an initiative in Jackson, Mississippi, bearing the Freedom Farms name and motivated by similar aims carries forward this legacy. ⁷³ The project also calls to mind contemporary currents of autonomous feminism that envisage the “reproductive commons” as sites for building the foundations of a new society. ⁷⁴ Even as we turn back now to economic bicameralism and its links to state and market, it is worth remembering the role that such zones of relative autonomy and self-sufficiency can play in decommodifying labor, challenging racial and gender inequality, and building economic democracy. ⁷⁵

Bicameral Firms, Economic Democracy, and the Cause of Freedom

In the 1880s, two decades after the end of the Civil War and just before the Populist Party reached the height of its influence, the Knights of Labor, a national labor federation, had a membership that was seven hundred thousand strong and included large numbers of Black and Chicano workers. ⁷⁶ Embodying labor republican values, significant elements within the federation sought to challenge wage slavery by advancing worker ownership and control over the means of production, and the Knights organized hundreds of producer and worker cooperatives. ⁷⁷ Many of these unionized cooperatives had significant numbers of members of color, including a cotton gin run by Black worker-owners in Alabama. ⁷⁸ Yet, the Knights were not immune from the racially charged xenophobia of their day. Mirroring the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the federation barred exploited Chinese immigrant workers from joining its ranks. ⁷⁹

Dwelling on this episode for a moment can help us integrate different strands of the discussion above, serving as a jumping off point for thinking about what all of this means for economic bicameralism. Although the promise of building multiracial coalitions to transform wage slavery was largely defeated for the reasons that Du Bois and Roediger articulated, here we have, on the heels of the Reconstruction era, a not insignificant example of Black, Chicano, and white workers working alongside one another to do just that. Of course, the exclusion of Chinese workers is significant—and a further look would no doubt reveal other, more subtle forms of racial inequity. The larger point is that movements to build worker power contain conflicting tendencies: They can empower those racialized as inferior and help knit together powerful multiracial coalitions in the ways many recent labor struggles have shown, but they can also come out in defense of racial capitalism. Regardless, even in examples like that of the Knights that we hold up as our models, the journey toward racial inclusion is always unfinished.

The union cooperatives organized by the Knights also provide a glimpse of what it can look like when the kinds of broad structural power unions are sometimes able to wield within labor markets and the kinds of deep democracy cooperatives can create at the enterprise level become interlinked. These formations are sparse and often fleeting within the overall sweep of capitalism—not surprisingly, since they rock its foundations when taken to scale. Here, economic bicameralism holds strategic promise as a kind of intermediate step toward liberation from wage slavery. Granted, there are real questions around how it might fit within larger strategies to advance economic democracy and racial equality.

Before we get to those questions, let us start with how the internal structure and workings of bicameral firms might be configured to address racial capitalism. Economic bicameralism brings labor into parity with capital. In turn, it raises a set of questions around how to ensure equality, including racial equality, among labor investors. One important issue is how to prevent racism from seeping into the representational structures of the labor chamber of the bicameral firm. This might be addressed by creating caucus structures such as those that have been established within union bodies, ⁸⁰ and ensuring that structurally marginalized groups receive formal representation in the chamber of the labor investors. Yet, even in worker cooperatives that are inclusive in their formal structures, the convergence of race, gender, and occupational position have been shown to bear heavily on who exerts authority in practice. ⁸¹ Challenging racism in the inner workings of the bicameral firm would thus require a deeper set of commitments.

Related to the nexus of race and class, Ronald Takaki observed that “racial inequality and occupational stratification have come to coexist in a mutually reinforcing and dynamic structural relationship.” ⁸² One of the Gordian knots of racial capitalism, this entanglement raises two important issues for economic bicameralism. One has to do with cultivating solidarity. In firms with an elaborate division of labor and high degrees of job and occupational differentiation, divergent economic interests can undermine cohesion in the ranks of labor. ⁸³ The racialized dimension of these hierarchies and the continuing potency of the wages of whiteness only add to the challenge, demanding strategies for countering white supremacy and bridging racial divides, including through political education.

For bicameral firms with more radically egalitarian designs, a second issue has to do with actively challenging hierarchical norms and practices that are embedded in the larger economy. Ferreras notes that bicameral firms could help to “reconstitute” the division between conception and execution within firms, and one can imagine how this could translate at a ground level into recasting occupational divisions of labor. Applying a racial capitalism lens would call attention to who gets slotted into what positions, how positions get valued based in part on who is in them, and whether everyone has similar opportunities for moving up. All are related in different ways to confronting the problem of racialized exploitation.

Another important set of issues related to the structure and workings of bicameral firms has to do with general pathways to entry as labor investors. If unions and worker cooperatives, the very organs meant to channel workplace democracy, have on too many occasions been known to block racial inclusion, then it is clear that bicameral firms would need to take special pains not to repeat similar mistakes. The problem is particularly vexing because racially exclusionary patterns often materialize in ways that are subtle and largely unconscious, as in the case of many worker cooperatives that emerged from the social networks of white progressives amid the counterculture of the 1970s. ⁸⁴ Bicameral firms would need to counter such tendencies through hiring and recruitment policies drawing on the best of what other progressive firms and labor organizations have done in this area.

In grappling with Du Bois’s and Gordon Nembhard's histories and Hamer's praxis, we are also faced with the question of who is able to form bicameral firms in the first place. More specifically, what chance do communities of color have to build bicameral firms rooted in their visions and needs? While economic bicameralism brings labor into parity with capital, it is not completely clear how the labor chamber would participate in initial investment decisions. Even if it did, racial inequities in the chamber of capital investors would undoubtedly figure into these decisions and the overall dynamics of how these firms were run once formed. Du Bois noted in his volume on Black cooperation and mutualism that a lack of accumulated wealth was a central factor inhibiting cooperative development in Black communities. ⁸⁵ This, in turn, was closely connected to his later analysis in Black Reconstruction showing how most freed slaves were denied land ownership and forced into debt through extractive sharecropping arrangements like the ones in which Hamer and her family remained ensnared generations later. ⁸⁶ Amid persisting racial wealth gaps, ⁸⁷ the question of racial representation within the chamber of capital investors is a challenging one—all the more given that decisions in this chamber are made on a “one share, one vote” basis (to remind readers, the labor chamber functions on “one member, one vote” basis).

This brings us, then, to the question of how economic bicameralism connects to larger strategies for advancing economic democracy and challenging racial capitalism, since racial wealth gaps and other equity concerns such as those raised above clearly cannot and should not be addressed at the firm level alone. Historically, the US government has been complicit in perpetuating racial wealth gaps. In the housing market, it enabled redlining that deprived communities of color of home ownership and then created the conditions for their “inclusion” to become yet another basis for extraction and ever-deepening indebtedness. ⁸⁸ Truly repairing such wrongs would create a very different terrain of economic security and investment potential within currently marginalized communities of color. In the meantime, building on existing programs that support “minority and women-owned businesses,” targeted investment flows could make a meaningful difference. Importantly, bicameral firms could bring an added layer of accountability in ensuring that such businesses generate benefits that are broadly shared.

If we think about the project of economic democracy as one that aims to enlarge the freedom, agency, and voice people have in meeting their needs and shaping their livelihoods, then the role of the state must clearly be wide-ranging. In the United States, it would need to include a broad expansion of social rights and protections, measures to eliminate discrimination in how these rights are administered, and a shift in resources from the carceral state toward things like education and jobs creation—in other words, undoing many of the ways in which the US government has both reflected and facilitated the workings of racial capitalism in American life. In this context, it is worth considering what role bicameral firms might play—or, indeed, what role any private, for-profit firm should play—in delivering key services in areas such as social care. Within the neoliberal environment, it is easy to naturalize private, for-profit firms as the standard vehicle. But, apart from better regulating firms and reshaping their internal structures, perhaps it would be desirable if the profit motive could be eliminated from certain kinds of activities altogether. Building on the formidable progressive influence already wielded by some unions in the public sector, what if the bicameral concept could be recalibrated to advance greater voice and accountability in that arena?

There is a long game to bear in mind. But Ferreras’s Dewey-eyed pragmatism might also create angles of vision into openings that are worth seizing upon in the near term, leaving opportunities for further experimentation and democratic deepening down the line. Recently in the United States, a number of unions have been pursuing cooperative development in ways that harken back to the efforts of the Knights of Labor in the late nineteenth century. ⁸⁹ A few years ago, 1199SEIU, the nation's largest healthcare union, formed a committee to explore cooperative development in the long-term care sector. Union leaders have watched as Cooperative Home Care Associates, the nation's largest worker cooperative and an 1199 employer, has fought to improve conditions rather than cut corners for the immigrant women of color comprising its workforce. With the ship of privatization already having sailed and ongoing restructuring continuing to undercut the union's position, the committee believes that a worker cooperative strategy can help to stabilize employment and deepen voice for members while enabling seniors in underserved communities hit hardest by the impacts of restructuring—including nursing home closures—to age with dignity in the places they know. ⁹⁰ Though the aim is to create fully cooperative structures, arrangements akin to economic bicameralism have also been considered as a more practicable alternative in the near term.

The picture sketched here is distinctively American in important respects, but the confrontation between economic democracy and racial capitalism holds broader relevance, including in the metropoles of Europe. Here, immigration flows continue to follow old colonial routes and the intracontinental core-periphery circuits traced by Cedric Robinson. With racial, ethnic, and national differences often forming a basis for labor market segmentation in ways not unlike those seen in the United States, ⁹¹ and amid trends of rising immigration, far right parties have been gaining ground through antiimmigrant rhetoric and appeals to national purity. ⁹² In many cases, these parties have made significant inroads among segments of the working class that have previously been core constituencies within left political coalitions. ⁹³ At a time when capital is challenging long-standing labor and social settlements even in the heartlands of coordinated capitalism, ⁹⁴ these kinds of fractures are hugely consequential. By reckoning with racial capitalism, perhaps economic bicameralism could be part of the connective tissue needed to counter alienation and create new lines of solidarity.

The kinds of transnational bicameral firms that Ferreras envisions could also support the building of cross-racial and North-South alliances at a global level. In Black Reconstruction, even while focusing on the American context, Du Bois stressed the global dimensions of the intersections between racism and capitalism. He recognized capitalist exploitation as a problem that traversed boundaries of race and nation—indeed, his analysis of the wages of whiteness sought to draw attention precisely to the factors obscuring this reality. Yet, it was also evident to him that the “dark sea of human labor”—Black and brown workers in both the global North and global South—remained concentrated in the bottom rungs of the global economic division of labor, working under the most coercive conditions. ⁹⁵ Nearly one hundred years later, even with substantial shifts in class structures and the rising wealth and power of many nations in the global South, this basic pattern remains. And the wages of whiteness continue to cloud the humanity of Black and brown people, dampening prospects for collective action across multiple spheres, from local work sites to global networks of production and distribution. As the historical record makes clear, movements to build economic democracy must directly confront the “color line” that Du Bois posited as the central problem of his time, ⁹⁶ or risk buttressing the very forces standing in the way of human freedom.