Co-constitution or ecological dominance? Situating economy, culture and race in capitalism

This article responds to Andrew Smith's call for a renewed materialist anti-colonial sociology by engaging three conceptual pairs that organise his argument: economy versus culture, material versus ideational, and race versus class. While fully endorsing Smith's insistence that capitalism cannot be reduced to one axis among others, and that the critique of empire cannot be collapsed into a critique of epistemic hierarchies, the article questions whether the binary of ‘determinate consequence’ versus ‘constitutive force’ exhausts the available theoretical options. It argues that economy and culture are better understood as relatively autonomous but interdependent and co-constitutive institutional orders within the same capitalist totality – neither simply reflective of one another nor causally ordered in a single direction. The capitalist economy exercises disproportionate structuring capacity over other social spheres, but underdetermines them, creating genuine space for cultural formations to co-shape economic institutions. Race is then understood as a bivalent form of domination simultaneously embedded in capitalism's division of labour and in its institutionalised hierarchies of cultural devaluation: racialised economic exploitation and racist cultural hierarchy are co-constitutive, each presupposing and reproducing the other. The article concludes by drawing on debates about post-capitalist alternatives to reflect on what such a framework means for envisioning systemic alternatives.