The historian Peter James Hudson reminds us that the term “racial capitalism” is deeply tied to 1960s and ’70s South Africa, where revolutionaries like the National Liberation Front’s Neville Alexander (incarcerated with Nelson Mandela for working to destroy apartheid) and the South African Communist Party’s organizer (and onetime lawyer) Harold Wolpe debated their contemporaries about the nature of the relationship between race and class in South Africa’s social structure.
But the global studies scholar Yousuf Al-Bulushi reminds us of the relevance of broader trends and conversations in African political thought and practice at the time. During these same years, in Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam school of radical thought and in other countries, a connected set of researchers reshaped social science in a radically interdisciplinary direction. They argued that the global development of colonialism and capitalism had linked too tightly the history, economics, and sociology of far-flung reaches for countries or regions to be well understood in isolation. The work of this Tanzanian community — which included visiting thinkers like the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi, and the Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin — helped develop a number of new directions in left intellectual thought, including what’s now known as the world-systems theory.
The African American political theorist Cedric Robinson met and exchanged ideas with intellectuals and activists who had participated in these communities as he traveled in England and throughout the African continent. Thus, his classic text “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition” developed an analysis that borrowed from structural insights on the relationship of race, class, and capitalism developed by the South African Marxists, which he combined with the global scale of politics influenced by world-systems theories. As a result, Robinson’s book played an instrumental role in popularizing both the term and a version of the analysis known as “racial capitalism.”