By Musa T Bey

Introduction: Political Economy as a Weapon

Political economy is not merely the study of how economies work; it is the critical investigation of how power is organized through material life. It is the terrain where questions of production, exploitation, ownership, dispossession, labor, and the very conditions of human survival are contested. To understand political economy is to grasp the architecture of systemic inequality, the mechanisms of class domination, and the ways in which empire, race, and capital converge to shape the destinies of nations and people.

In its most radical traditions—Marxist, anti-colonial, and Black radical—political economy does not view the market as neutral or natural, but as a historical construct rooted in conquest, enclosure, and expropriation. It is a living battlefield shaped by centuries of resistance and accumulation. At its core, political economy asks: Who controls the means of life? Who benefits from labor? Who is rendered disposable in the process?

The Origins of Political Economy: Bourgeois Science and Its Discontents

The term “political economy” emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Classical political economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and later John Stuart Mill developed theories of value, labor, and production that reflected the interests of an ascendant bourgeois class. Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), for instance, celebrated the “invisible hand” of the market and laid the intellectual groundwork for liberal capitalism. Yet this so-called invisible hand was guided by very visible forces: slavery, colonial plunder, and the violent disciplining of the working class.

Classical political economy attempted to naturalize a system that was born in blood. It masked the social relations of production behind categories like “market,” “value,” and “efficiency.” But from its very inception, a counter-tradition emerged—one that refused to separate economics from violence and history. This radical tradition saw in capitalism not a system of liberty and progress, but a regime of theft, alienation, and domination.

Marx’s Intervention: Labor, Surplus, and Class Struggle

Karl Marx revolutionized political economy by exposing the exploitative core of capitalist production. His Critique of Political Economy and Capital systematically dismantled bourgeois economics and reframed the question of value around human labor.

For Marx, value is created by labor—but capital appropriates this value by paying workers less than the value they produce. This difference—the surplus value—is the source of capitalist profit. In other words, profit is theft. Marx’s genius was to show that capitalism is not simply a market system, but a class system rooted in exploitation and antagonism.

He wrote: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

Under capitalism, political economy becomes the study of vampirism: how capital lives off the unpaid labor of others. But Marx also understood that capitalism was dynamic and global, expanding through imperialism, colonization, and racialized violence. He was clear: the accumulation of capital in Europe was inseparable from genocide in the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade.

Colonialism and the Racial Logic of Political Economy

If Marx laid the foundation, then anti-colonial and Black radical thinkers exposed its global architecture. Thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, and Samir Amin deepened political economy by revealing how race, nation, and empire intersect with class.

Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, argued that capitalism in the U.S. was built not just on class exploitation, but on racial slavery. The working class was divided by the color line—a divide that served capital. Similarly, Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa exposed how colonialism systematically extracted value from African societies, destroying indigenous economies while enriching Europe. The colonies were not peripheral—they were central to the capitalist world system.

These traditions taught that capitalism is not simply Eurocentric; it is racial and imperial in structure. The political economy of the West cannot be understood apart from the plantations, mines, and labor camps of the Global South.

Neoliberalism: The New Face of an Old War

In the late 20th century, capitalism reinvented itself through neoliberalism—a counter-revolution against the gains of workers, liberation movements, and decolonization. Political economy in this era has been marked by privatization, deregulation, austerity, and the stripping away of social protections.

Neoliberalism is not just an economic project, but a political one. It reshapes the state itself—not to disappear, as its ideologues claim, but to serve capital more efficiently. The state becomes the enforcer of market discipline, using police, prisons, and borders to contain the surplus population rendered disposable by financial capitalism.

David Harvey described this as “accumulation by dispossession”—a continuation of primitive accumulation in new forms: gentrification, land grabs, debt bondage, and structural adjustment. Neoliberalism extends capital’s reach into every sphere of life, turning education, healthcare, even water and air into commodities.

The Pathologies of Capitalist Political Economy

The pathology of capitalist political economy lies in its elevation of profit over life. In this system:

Food is destroyed for price stability while people starve. Entire ecosystems are sacrificed for extraction and speculation. Workers are discarded when no longer “efficient.” Care, love, and creativity are devalued because they do not produce surplus value.

This is a system that produces abundance and scarcity simultaneously. It is capable of building empires and technologies, but incapable of feeding all, housing all, or healing all. The contradiction is not technical—it is political. The wealth of the few depends on the impoverishment of the many.

As Aimé Césaire wrote, capitalism is a “thingification” of the world. It reduces people, land, and life to resources for accumulation. It is a system that makes sense only when viewed from the vantage point of capital, not from the standpoint of humanity.

Political Economy and the Question of the State

The state plays a central role in political economy—not as a neutral arbiter, but as a class instrument. Whether through military conquest, tax policy, or corporate subsidies, the state facilitates accumulation. Even welfare programs, when they exist, are often designed to stabilize capitalist reproduction, not to challenge it.

Revolutionary political economy must therefore consider not just markets, but the apparatus of state power—courts, police, military, schools, borders—and how these institutions reproduce class and racial hierarchies.

But the state is also a site of struggle. From the Paris Commune to the Zapatistas, from the Soviet Union to Burkina Faso under Sankara, revolutionary movements have attempted to transform or replace the capitalist state with institutions rooted in popular control. The question is not merely reform versus revolution, but how power is organized: Who decides? Who owns? Who plans?

Toward a Liberatory Political Economy

A truly liberatory political economy must begin with the rejection of capitalist assumptions. It must refuse the fetish of growth, the worship of GDP, and the cult of efficiency. Instead, it must ask: What do people need? What does the Earth need? How do we organize production for life, not for profit?

Liberatory political economy envisions:

Democratic control over production and distribution. Collective ownership of land, housing, and energy. The abolition of wage slavery and guaranteed dignified livelihoods for all. Reparations for colonialism, slavery, and genocide. A planned economy rooted in ecological stewardship and solidarity.

This is not a utopia—it is a necessity. Climate collapse, mass displacement, fascist resurgence, and endless war are the price of maintaining the current system. If we do not transform political economy, it will destroy us.

Conclusion: The Struggle Over Everything

To study political economy is to study the structure of our lives. To change political economy is to fight for a different world. This struggle is not just economic—it is moral, cultural, and existential.

Revolutionary political economy is not a blueprint, but a compass. It points us toward systems built on care, cooperation, and common good. It reminds us that another world is possible—but only if we organize, resist, and reclaim power from the forces that have privatized life itself.

As the old world burns, we must ask: What kind of economy is worth living in? What kind of society is worth fighting for?