Political theologies structure who counts as human in proletarianization.

Evidence

Competing theo-politics of race thus vied for mastery over South Africa’s coming into being and emergence into modernity as the nineteenth century came to a close. Blacks found themselves squeezed between two cultures of political theology seeking to texture the forces of modernizing proletarianization: a culture of missionary conversion and a culture of political messianism. These two forms of political theology both contest and curtail, structure and stream conditions of proletarianization in the region. They shape who counts and who is simply instrumentalized, who can serve in the Kingdom of Heaven and who banished to underworlds of spirits variously conceived and consumed. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1480

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that missionary conversion and political messianism jointly shaped racialized labor regimes—determining who counts versus who is instrumentalized—is analytically dense and paradigm-shifting for understanding race and capitalism together.
• XREF: connects to: All political power contains an irreducible theocratic element — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1988; The picaresque tradition interrogates who counts as human when the poor are animalized — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 181