Racial Socialism is an ERC Consolidator research project, starting in November 2026. It 
focuses on humanitarian work in socialist countries to generate new perspectives on racialization. Racialization is the process of constructing certain groups as fundamentally distinct from one another based on allegedly essential biological differences. The role that racialization has played in the historical emergence of capitalism is well understood, as the extraction of socio-economic value has often been justified by the framing of populations as ontologically different along racialized lines. Yet, historical sources also show that people in socialist societies were racialized, too, but little theoretical work has been done to clarify this apparent contradiction.
By studying national Red Cross societies in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, I will examine the ways that racialization was deployed in socialist societies. I propose an anthropology of value as a groundbreaking way of analyzing the contradictions of racialization under socialism. I will approach socialist countries as societies with multiple forms of value that were organized internally according to a particular logic, or a set of competing logics, operating at multiple scales.
The key objectives of Racial Socialism are to:
- undertake original empirical research on whether different groups were racialized in socialist Red Cross societies and, if so, how;
- in the selected socialist countries, identify different registers and struggles over value, including political, economic, social, and cultural value, and their modes of hierarchical integration;
- theorize racialization in socialism, which has typically been understood as part of capitalist social formations. By combining detailed historical research on socialist humanitarian organizations with anthropological theories of value and racialization, I will develop new perspectives on this contradiction.