Racial Capitalist Labor Regime (RCLR)

The Racial Capitalist Labor Regime (RCLR) is Soulwork's account of the system that has organized Black labor, and Black women's labor specifically, since chattel slavery.

Cedric Robinson establishes that capitalism has been racial from its origins. Orlando Patterson establishes that the position of the enslaved is a form of social death, and Hortense Spillers establishes the mechanism through which that death runs specifically through gender. The RCLR is what these three arguments produce when read together and turned toward the specific texture of Black women's and MaGes' labor.

The RCLR persists across a single continuous arc: chattel slavery, Reconstruction's betrayal, sharecropping and the Great Migration, deindustrialization and mass incarceration, welfare reform and the gig economy. The mechanisms change. The founding claim does not: that Blackness marks a being whose labor, body, and interiority are available for use without remainder.

Spillers gives this regime its mechanism. She distinguishes the body, (the site of legal personhood, gendered recognition, and civic protection), from the flesh, (the substrate that remains once those protections are stripped away: available for injury, labor, and appraisal without the mediation of personhood at all). White womanhood was built through domesticity, legal protection, and paternal claim. Black women were ejected from that order.

Virginia's 1662 statute, partus sequitur ventrem, "that which is born follows the womb," codified this exclusion in law. Historian Jennifer Morgan has shown that colonial law fused enslaved women's reproductive capacity and their labor into a single economic apparatus. Gender as protection was destroyed, but sex as an extractive fact was retained. Spillers calls the resulting position vestibular: standing at the threshold of the human category. As women, Black enslaved laborers were recognized as female exactly to the degree that femaleness could be made to produce value. Saidiya Hartman has shown that Black personhood under slave law followed the same logic in miniature: the enslaved were recognized as human primarily where the law needed to hold them criminally liable, and denied personhood everywhere else. Black female slaves, read this way, occupied a specific vestibular position, compounded by their specific social location on Patricia Hill Collins's matrix of domination.

Following Jacqueline Jones's account of Black women's labor, which draws no line between paid and unpaid work, Soulwork identifies three arenas across which the RCLR demands a totalizing extraction of energy: the Home, the Community, and the Labor Market.

Each arena's demand on a person's energy undercuts her capacity to meet the demands of the other two. The Labor Market's requirement of constant availability drains the energy the Home needs for uncompensated care, and penalizes that same caregiving through lost wages, stalled promotion, or termination. The Home's demand for total domestic and emotional output leaves nothing in reserve for the Community, which absorbs the shortfall by conscripting Black women and MaGes into further uncompensated labor as stand in for institutions that have failed. The Community then routes its unmet needs back through the same women, deepening the exhaustion the Labor Market punishes as unreliability. Each domain solves its own extraction problem by drawing down the reserves the other two require.

Soulwork's response, five pillars enacted against exactly this regime, is described in full on the Framework page.
→ Read the Framework