By Charisse Burden-Stelly
Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American studies at Wayne State University and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Research & Political Education Team. She is co-editor, with Percy Hintzen and Aaron Kamugisha, of the recently published Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, with University Press of Mississippi
For more than forty years, Dr. Percy C. Hintzen has provided some of the most significant and enduring analyses of the colonial and postcolonial realities of the Caribbean. He has published books, articles, and public scholarship invaluable to understanding how Western imperialism, underdevelopment, neocolonialism, and elite domination have fundamentally shaped the political economy and social relations of the Anglophone Caribbean generally, and Guyana, Trinidad, and Barbados particularly. His work engages a broad range of issues, from structural adjustment to creole capture of the state apparatus to capitalist globalization to the politics of identity. This is not to mention Hintzen’s invaluable contributions to African Diaspora Studies through his study of, inter alia, the discourse, policy, and practice of economic development; the intersections of modernity, nationalism, and citizenship; and West Indian identity formation in the West. With this extensive body of work, we are left with a rich understanding of the ways that Caribbean subjects and subjectivities have been at the center of the material and cultural realities of the modern world. Another of Hintzen’s contributions is mentoring a cadre of students whose scholarship on subjects including racial capitalism, coloniality, Black sexuality and ballroom culture, and migration and transnationalism has shaped several fields of study precisely because of his mentorship and influence. The recent co-edited collection, Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, encapsulates Hintzen’s range, rigor, and continued relevance—and the mutual respect and intellectual feedback loop between himself and his students.
As a scholar of racial capitalism, Hintzen’s interventions, including several of the chapters collected in Reproducing Domination—not least our co-authored essay, “Culturalism, Development, and the Crisis of Socialist Transformation”—have been foundational to my understanding of the intersections of racial formation, economic exploitation, and the globalized nature of the state. Like my own work, the essays collected in this volume bring together the two dominant approaches to racial capitalism, each of which is relevant to the neocolonial realities of the Caribbean postcolonial state. The first approach comes from Cedric Robinson’s 1983 publication, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition and, more significantly, its republication in 2000 with a new preface by the author and a foreword written by historian Robin D. G. Kelley (Another volume of Black Marxism was published in 2021, attesting to the continued significance of this approach to racial capitalism.) For Cedric Robinson, racial capitalism describes how “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions,” as did social ideology and political practice. Further, “as a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.” Capitalism, Robinson contends, did not represent a radical rupture from or a negation of feudalism, but rather an extension of its racialism into “the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations.” As such, it was not capitalism that shaped modern European civilization, but rather European civilization that gave capitalism its world-historical and sociopolitical character. Racial capitalism, in other words, was the continuation of “the social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms”—that is, its “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms—into the capitalist form.
The second approach to racial capitalism, according to the editors of The Black Agenda Review, is rooted in South African political economy, emerging from the context of anti-apartheid and liberation struggles in Southern Africa and the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s. It was a rejection of both liberal approaches to capitalist reform and Marxist analyses that were inattentive to the intersections of race and class division. Historian Peter James Hudson distinguishes this political economy approach from Robinson’s political philosophical conceptualization of racial capitalism. The South African educator and political activist Neville Alexander summed up racial capitalism as the expression of capitalism in South Africa appended to foreign capital that produced racist ideology and “political forms of racial discrimination” against which mass liberation struggles had been waged. Its foundations were in capitalist mining interests at the turn of the twentieth century: mining capitalists avoided protracted class struggle with white miners by entrenching a “semi-slave system” in which Black laborers would remain in unskilled, low wage work, while white mineworkers “would have jobs reserved for them at semi-skilled and skilled levels with wage rates appropriate to a level of full proletarianization.” Thus, “racial differentiation was institutionalised within the South African working class on terms which perpetuated the profit rates of the mining industry.” As the Union of South Africa came into being, the racial differentiation that constituted the mining industry became institutionalized as the policy of racial segregation. This segregation was the foundation of the apartheid system that arose in 1948, with the blessing of the United States, the World Bank, and other Western foreign investors. In effect, these entities reinscribed racial capitalism—and the Bantustans that developed in the 1950s and 1960s —through direct investment and loans. In effect, the racial capitalism in South Africa was the structure through which African exploitation and dispossession were inscribed in and inextricable from the economic interests of the partnership between foreign capital and the South African state.
Hintzen’s analysis brings together not only the political economy and political philosophy of racial capitalism, but also its culture and ideology, and its social relations and ways of knowing. Scholars in disciplines from sociology to political science have tended either to leave the state by the wayside in their studies of transterritorial and supranational regimes of governance, movements of peoples and goods, and cultural circulations; or have remained entrapped in a nation-state framework that neglected the internationalist, world-systemic, and global realities of culture and political economy. In contrast, Hintzen’s work on the Caribbean (not to mention Africa and Latin America) has consistently offered a methodology for expertly avoiding such pitfalls by centering racial capitalism. As he explained in the Prologue of Reproducing Domination, he understands the state as constitutively global, given that “The Westphalian form of national authority and sovereignty appears merely to be an instrumentality for the management of global flows for capitalist accumulation.” Additionally, “The state reveals itself to have always been a global imposition upon national territories, organizing inflows and outflows of people, finance, resources, technology, and information in keeping with the needs of capital.”
One of Hintzen’s most important scholarly contributions to the study of racial capitalism is his exploration of the transition from regimes of developmentalism to the neoliberal turn and the hegemony of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) in the context of elite class formation and the entrapment of the Caribbean postcolonial state in international capitalist imperatives. It is here that he most powerfully brings into sharp relief the entanglements of political economy, ideology, racial formation, and cultural narration in the reproduction and maintenance of racial capitalism. Developmentalism, an essential technology of racial capitalism after World War II, was grounded in the racial ordering of states based on ideologies of “modern” and “backward” that legitimized domination and control by those deemed developed and justified their intervention in the social, political and economic lives of the racially and economically underdeveloped. Hintzen explains in a piece called “Racism in Foreign Policy and Development Programs” that, “Development policy, in its application pertain exclusively, and not surprisingly, to those countries that lie outside the North Atlantic… The descendants of Western Europe… are located at the top of a development pyramid.” The idea was that modernization and high standards of living could be achieved in the underdeveloped world if a particular path set out by Western powers generally, and the United States particularly, was strictly followed. Any resistance was interpreted as indisputable evidence of the irredeemable inferiority of racialized/backward populations and nations, and became used to explain and rationalize the resource and income gap between North and South.
At the same time, developmentalism demanded the organization of centralized state power in postcolonial states, not only to manage the ostensible implementation of modernization and development but also to maintain political order, understood as the ability to adhere to and abide by the dictates of international capitalist institutions, policies, and practices. State-organized corporatism created an elite comprised of non-proletarian workers and an “aristocracy of labor” (political parties and industrial unions) controlled by what Hintzen described as “professional and intellectual elites” who operated in the interest of international capital. The former anticolonial nationalists morphed into the elite class that implemented developmental policies that would ostensibly bring them closer to the material conditions of wealth enjoyed in the dominant capitalist nations. Hintzen argued that this is not least because “the upper and middle strata are integrally tied to and dependent upon the state” and upon international capital for all form of access, including “states of exception” that allow them to employ “corruption, cronyism, and nepotism” in efforts to garner and maintain material and cultural resources. Ultimately, power, authority, and control of the state rested in the meritocratic and technical claim of the upper and middle strata to cultural superiority—read proximity to Western values, ethics, and imperatives—as the agents of modernization and development.
As a quintessentially Caribbean subject, born in Guyana and raised in Barbados, Hintzen intimates in “The Arc of the Postcolonial,” that his sensitivity to racial injustice, imperialism, and militarism at the intersection of British coloniality and U.S. capitalist hegemony made him skeptical “that the postcolonial arc bent in the direction of a transformative agenda for justice.” Nonetheless, his unique study, critique, and attempt to reshape the arc of the postcolonial ultimately put justice back on the table. His unparalleled ability to bring together the local, national, and global contours of political economy, class, race, culture, ideology, and state formation positions him as one of the most careful and sophisticated scholars of the Caribbean as the cradle of the modern world. His body of work, only a fraction of which is collected in Reproducing Domination, makes an important but heretofore unacknowledged contribution to the political philosophy and political economy of racial capitalism.
