This dissertation synthesizes Marxian philosophy with contemporary analytic social ontology in order to theorize the historical and ongoing systematic connections between capital accumulation and racial oppression. It presents a novel reconstruction of Marx’s implicit social ontology, which it argues undergirds the explanatory and critical project of the critique of political economy. It makes use of this reconstructed social ontology to advance an account of the historical construction of race in the early modern Atlantic transition to capitalism.

It is organized into three parts. The first part assesses the contributions and limitations of Althusserian and Value-Form theory interpretations of Marx’s social ontology to the project of theorizing racial capitalism. The second part offers a reconstruction of Marx’s social ontology, focusing on practices, categories, structures, and systems. It argues that Marx’s practical materialism of the 1840s is a viable contemporary social ontological position and that Marx’s concern with practically constructed social categories finds resonance with non-intentionalist positions in analytic social ontology. Further, it provides a new analysis of social structural causality based on the application of Jessica Wilson’s model of weak metaphysical emergence. The third part introduces the concept of constructivist historiography, the writing of histories of processes of social construction, and presents a sketch constructivist historiography of modern race. It claims that modern race was originally constructed as a practically enacted social division in the immediate aftermath of the colonization of the Americas, prior to the development of racial discourses or pseudo-scientific biological race theories, and that the historical construction of race was connected to the global emergence of capitalism.