The stakes of postcolonial sociology in an age of racial capitalism

If you read Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism closely in the right places, there is an irreconcilable tension. On the one hand, Robinson is insistent: Black radicalism was not a product of capitalist exploitation but is instead linked to ‘African peoples and the African diaspora’ (Robinson 2020: 119–20); it was ‘rooted in a specifically African development’ (Robinson 2020: 317). As he argues over the course of the book, Black resistance emerges directly from African culture, which, he suggests, is unique in its impulse toward community formation rather than violence. On the other hand, we are told that the ‘dialectical matrix’ of this Black resistance politics ‘was capitalist slavery and imperialism’, and he proceeds to name key sites of contestation: ‘India, Algeria, Angola, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Mozambique’ (Robinson, 2020: 167).

Is Robinson's object of analysis here subjects of imperialist domination in general, or rather, is he only concerned with African-descended exemplars of what he terms the Black radical tradition? I had this tension in mind as I made my way through Andrew Smith's (2026) frontal assault on ‘post-colonial sociology‘, as he terms it. While broadly sympathetic to his materialist critique, I found myself grappling with a slippage throughout. The postcoloniality he invokes in the title quickly gives way to a broader analysis of capitalist imperialism. Even in the opening line of the abstract, ‘black radical and anti-colonial writing’ are discussed in a single breath. These authors, and specifically ‘a materialist current in black radical and anti-colonial writing’, play the role of the hero, ‘integrat[ing] a critique of colonial epistemologies with an account of the motivations, rationalities and structures consequent on colonial regimes of accumulation’.

A couple of pages later, Smith (2026) is engaging literature on ‘racialised capitalism’ as a way of intervening in postcolonial debates. By the end of the piece, his lens is entirely trained on race, from Fanon's phenomenology of racialization to an equation of colonialism with ‘racialised structures of exploitation’. This allows him at the final moment to bring in Ruth Wilson Gilmore's account of prison capitalism in the United States as a shining example of the work he would like to see. And of course, Gilmore's (2007, 2022) work on this score is wonderful – I happen to be a big proponent myself. But is there not a conflation at work here, eradicating the specificities of postcolonial development trajectories? If the colonial is merely capitalist imperialism, which is to say capitalism, and that capitalism is always a racialized capitalism, are we not left with an account in which we analyze racial capitalism while claiming to have analyzed postcoloniality?

It is because I am broadly sympathetic to Smith's project that I want to dwell on some of these tensions. I agree with him that postcolonial analysts are quick to isolate epistemic features of (post)colonialism from their material contexts, which is to say, from the context of capitalist domination. But I worry about his hard and fast distinction between ‘accounts which treat knowledge and understanding as precursory conditions of social relations, and those accounts which treat them as the situated, emergent outcome of those relations and our grappling with them’ (Smith, 2026). Of course, the phrase ‘our grappling with them‘ gives him a way out: a focus not only on material relations but on subaltern conceptions of those relations. But this aspect is not given much emphasis in the piece. Instead, ‘particular “ways of making sense” of the world [are conceived as] a determinate consequence of the racialised structures of exploitation which capitalist imperialism established and sustained’.

In my view, this formulation puts all of the analytical weight on the side of domination. The sociologist's work is reduced to a reconstruction of all of the ways that the market imperative comes to produce an especially vicious form of subjection. But before I discuss what this account does not allow us to analyze – forms of resistance – I want to dwell on Smith's formulation here for a moment. I find the phrase ‘racialised structures of exploitation’ striking in this context. First, there is the question of exploitation. Is this really the primary mechanism through which capitalist imperialism is realized in the colonized world?

I could not help but think of Rosa Luxemburg's (2016: 259) formulation in which force plays a key role in facilitating the ‘exchange between the capitalist and the noncapitalist forms of production’, the latter of which she associates with much of the colonial world. In addition to violent forms of direct labor control, she discusses land grabs, integration into markets at the barrel of a gun, and the role taxation and debt plays in this process. But forms of colonial extraction beyond exploitation are scarcely discussed by Smith or even invoked. Are we to read ‘racialised’ in ‘racialised structures of exploitation’ as a euphemism for coercive forms of labor governance?

In more recent formulations, including Nancy Fraser's (2022), the role of racialization is reduced to violence, as in her distinction between exploitation as a class process and expropriation as linked to racial domination – as if proletarianization itself were not effected through dispossession, or as if racism were not predicated upon a variegated scheme of labor-power valuation. We may not have to choose between violence and exploitation, but surely violence plays a major role in the imperialist domination Smith is interested in centering. Indeed, Fanon (2004: 64), upon whom Smith draws heavily, famously notes the marginal role of exploitation in the colonial world, referring to the proletariat as ‘relatively privileged’ with ‘everything to lose’, or what he calls the “bourgeois” fraction of the colonized population’.

The second question I wanted to raise around Smith's formulation – that consciousness follows from racialized exploitation – concerns the relationship between what he calls capitalist imperialism on the one hand and racial capitalism on the other. In the bulk of the piece, it is through racialized exploitation that capitalist imperialism is put into practice, which raises the question: should we understand racial capitalism as the means through which the colonized world is subject to imperialism? And if this is the case, does this not eviscerate any meaningful distinction between racialized exploitation in the core and colonial domination in the periphery?

It strikes me that one consequence of this move is that colonial forms of capitalism lose their specificity, becoming assimilated to capitalism in general. If colonial epistemes, ideologies, and so forth emerge as a consequence of capitalist imperialism, but capitalist imperialism turns out to be just another variety of racial capitalism, it is capitalism rather than imperialism that appears to be doing all the heavy lifting. Perhaps this is Smith's intention. But I am curious as to how he might distinguish colonial, and more importantly for our present purposes, postcolonial development trajectories from those in the racial capitalist core.

This raises yet another question: where does postcolonial sociology fit into all of this? Despite opening the title and serving as the article's first keyword, nearly all references to the postcolonial in Smith's piece are references to ‘post-colonial theory’, ‘post-colonial-criticism’, and ‘post-colonial literary studies’. This amounts to a sleight of hand. Is it really so surprising that literary theorists focus on the discursive register? It is notable how sparsely postcolonial sociology is cited throughout the piece. There are of course theoretical contributions from Julian Go and Gurminder Bhambra. But what about the voluminous empirical work on distinctively postcolonial development trajectories?

In my view, this is the materialist analysis for which Smith is searching. What makes postcolonial contexts different from the rest of the world? I fully agree with Smith that attempts to root this in a distinctive cultural essence is not only a specious project but reads consequence as cause. But how should we understand this ‘cause’, and how does it differ from other capitalist cases? Again, I agree with Smith that colonial domination and its afterlives are inextricable from the history of capitalist development. But surely there is something unique about living in a context in which one's country is a former colony. As I argue in my book (Levenson, 2022), for example, postcolonial states tend to pair redistribution with dispossession, making it rather useless to try to characterize them as either welfare states or as straightforwardly neoliberal. Perhaps too there is something that can be said about the repressive apparatus of postcolonial states, especially late decolonizers, and what it means to have absorbed anticolonial resistance into a police force. What sort of trajectory might this set in motion?

Likewise, there is something to be said about the subaltern political scene in the postcolonial world. On the one hand, the legacy of anticolonial movements keeps forms of radical politics alive that are often quite marginal in the imperial core. On the other, vicious forms of xenophobia, ethno-nationalist chauvinism, and other reactionary currents have a popular manifestation in the postcolonial world that they often lack in the core. What does it mean that both extremes tend to coexist in postcolonial contexts? How might continued forms of neo-colonial domination, whether through direct extraction, dependency, or global labor arbitrage exacerbate these political tendencies?

There is also the question of political economic trajectories. How might we characterize economic development pathways beyond simply pointing to the fact of continued dependency? In other words, how might colonial legacies coupled with neo-colonial constraints shape economic development patterns? And beyond thinking about ‘objective’ economic measures, we might also try to say something about economic development strategies on the part of postcolonial governments. What political economic strategies tend to prevail, and how might we typologize them?

So far, I have been fairly schematic, separating popular politics, the state, and the economy into mutually distinct spheres. There is a bit of overlap, of course, insofar as the state and the economy are inextricably linked. We might also try to proceed relationally, asking how what happens in one sphere affects developments in another. For example, popular politics clearly influence the form of the state; at the very least, postcolonial states frequently appeal directly to populations in order to reproduce their own legitimacy. Late decolonizers especially tend to emphasize redistribution, articulated as reversing the wrongs wrought by colonial rule. But in other cases, the veneer of social democracy is left to the side, with a whole slew of more authoritarian state-forms evident across multiple continents. How might we make sense of this diversity? Under what conditions does one state-form as opposed to another appear, and to what extent is this bound up with the relationship between the state and the popular masses?

And this brings me to my final point: I wonder what a more relational materialism might look like for postcolonial sociology. Again, I am with Smith in advocating a materialist turn. I am just as frustrated as he is by accounts that attempt to divorce ways of being in the world from their social contexts. But we should be cautious about simply inverting this scheme into a Feuerbachian materialism in which ‘ways of making sense of the world’ are straightforwardly ‘a determinate consequence of the racialised structures of exploitation’, ‘only the local echo of a wider, globalised process of accumulation’ (Smith, 2026). Yes, these ‘ways of making sense of the world’ do emerge in determinate contexts – no question. But once they become facts on the ground, subaltern politics works by articulating its demands and interests in idioms established by ‘racialised structures of exploitation’.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that Smith is engaging in such a crude materialism; he is not. But given that the piece does not contain a program for putting postcolonial sociology into practice, I feel compelled to offer this as a cautionary note. Such a project requires avoiding both pitfalls: a redescriptive idealism on the one side, a political economy of capitalist development pitched at a high level of abstraction on the other. As Smith rightly insists, ideas only emerge in determinate social contexts. These are not just contexts, but determinate contexts. It is therefore equally incumbent upon us not to deduce these ideas from on high, but instead to account for – and explain – actually existing politics, ideology, culture, and so forth in the postcolonial world.