Class and State Relations in Post-Colonial Societies: A Neo-Marxist View

When colonial rule ended across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a puzzling question remained: who actually controls the new state? In classical Marxist theory, the state is simply an instrument of the ruling capitalist class. But post-colonial societies did not fit this neat picture. They had inherited massive bureaucracies and armies, yet often lacked a strong, mature capitalist class to command them. To explain this gap, neo-Marxist scholars like Hamza Alavi and Issa Shivji developed a fresh framework for relating class to the state. Their work shows how the post-colonial state, armed with a powerful military-bureaucratic apparatus, became a relatively independent player that balances competing class interests rather than serving a single master.

Why classical Marxism could not explain the post-colonial state 🔗

To understand the neo-Marxist intervention, we first need to know what they were reacting against. Classical Marxism offers two broad readings of the state. The instrumentalist view, associated with thinkers like Ralph Miliband, treats the state as a direct tool of the dominant capitalist class. The structuralist view, developed by Nicos Poulantzas, argues that the state enjoys “relative autonomy” from the capitalist class so that it can act against the short-term interests of individual capitalists in order to preserve the long-term stability of the system as a whole.

Both readings, however, were built by studying advanced Western economies like Britain, where the capitalist class had matured before the modern state took shape. In those societies, an ascendant native bourgeoisie created the state to protect its own capitalist relations of production. Post-colonial societies were structurally different. Here the state was not built by a homegrown capitalist class at all. As the broader Marxist tradition itself recognised, the political and the economic spheres in these societies followed a path shaped entirely by colonial domination. Applying a model designed for Britain to newly independent Pakistan, Tanzania, or India would therefore be a mistake.

Hamza Alavi and the overdeveloped state 🔗

The most influential answer came from the Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi. In his landmark 1972 essay in the New Left Review, titled “The State in Post-Colonial Societies,” Alavi argued that the essential problem of the post-colonial state stems from a single historical fact: it was not established by a native bourgeoisie but by a foreign imperialist bourgeoisie.

What “overdeveloped” actually means 🔗

Alavi’s central concept is the overdeveloped state. During colonial rule, the foreign power needed a strong apparatus to control not one class but several at once, including the local landed elites and the emerging native traders. To do this, it built a highly developed bureaucracy and military that towered over every indigenous social class. When independence arrived, this powerful colonial machinery did not disappear. The new nation simply inherited an apparatus far larger and more powerful than its own underdeveloped social and economic base could naturally produce. The state was therefore “overdeveloped” relative to the society beneath it.

This matters because the usual Marxist logic gets reversed. In the West, the bourgeoisie created the state. In the post-colonial world, the state often shapes and disciplines the classes. A weak native bourgeoisie, freshly freed from direct metropolitan control, finds itself unable to subordinate the highly developed apparatus it has inherited. Power flows instead to those who sit at the top of the bureaucratic-military hierarchy.

The three propertied classes and the mediating state 🔗

Alavi identified a specific set of class forces competing within the post-colonial social formation. The state, he argued, is relatively autonomous because it mediates the competing interests of three propertied classes: the metropolitan bourgeoisie (foreign capital from the former colonial power and its allies), the indigenous bourgeoisie (the local business and trading class), and the landed classes (large landowners and rural elites).

None of these three is strong enough to dominate the others outright. So the bureaucratic-military oligarchy steps in as a manager. It does not represent any single class. Instead, it acts on behalf of all three together, holding the coalition in balance in order to preserve the social order in which all their interests are embedded. This is the heart of Alavi’s contribution: the state’s autonomy is not a sign of neutrality, but a structural feature that arises precisely because no class can rule alone.

Issa Shivji and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie 🔗

If Alavi mapped the South Asian experience, the Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji carried the analysis into Africa and pushed it one decisive step further. Working on Tanzania under Julius Nyerere’s socialist project, Ujamaa, Shivji asked a sharp question: if no traditional capitalist class controlled the state, then which class actually held power?

A new class born from the state itself 🔗

Shivji’s answer, developed in his 1972 work The Silent Class Struggle and his 1976 book Class Struggles in Tanzania, was that the ruling group was a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” in alliance with imperialism. This was a radical idea. The people running the state, the senior officials, party leaders, and managers of nationalised industries, did not own private capital in the classical sense. Their power came from controlling the state apparatus itself. By controlling state resources, they functioned as a property-owning ruling class even though their base was administrative rather than commercial.

This refines Alavi’s picture in an important way. For Alavi, the overdeveloped bureaucracy mediates between existing propertied classes. For Shivji, the bureaucracy can itself harden into a class. The state stops being a referee standing above the players and becomes a team that has entered the game on its own behalf.

How socialist rhetoric served class interests 🔗

One of Shivji’s most striking arguments concerns the language of socialism. Tanzania’s 1967 Arusha Declaration committed the ruling party to an African path to socialism, including the nationalisation of key sectors. Shivji argued that this rhetoric, while presented as a project for the people, actually served as an ideological cover for the bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Nationalisation allowed this class to dominate economic resources, destroy its rival the old commercial bourgeoisie (largely the Asian trading minority), and weaken the wealthy peasant class in the countryside, all in the name of socialism.

This shows the analytical power of the neo-Marxist method. Rather than taking official ideology at face value, it asks which class benefits from a given set of policies. The conclusion was uncomfortable: a state claiming to build socialism could simultaneously be consolidating the power of a new ruling elite.

The common thread: relative autonomy and social order 🔗

Despite their different settings, Alavi and Shivji share a core insight that defines the neo-Marxist view of the post-colonial state. The state is neither a simple puppet of foreign capital nor a neutral servant of the whole nation. It occupies a distinctive middle position, holding a degree of independence from every class while still operating to keep the overall class system intact.

This idea of relative autonomy connects their work to the wider neo-Marxist tradition. Poulantzas had argued that the capitalist state must be able to rise above the squabbles of individual capitalists in order to organise their collective long-term interests and hold the social formation together. Alavi and Shivji took this logic and rooted it in the concrete history of colonialism, where the inherited strength of the bureaucracy and army made that autonomy far more pronounced than in the West. The state’s main task, in both accounts, is to maintain social order by managing class tensions that the classes themselves cannot resolve.

Why this debate still matters 🔗

These theories were written in the 1970s, but the questions they raise remain alive. They help explain why, in many post-colonial countries, the bureaucracy and the armed forces wield such outsized influence over politics and the economy. They also explain why control over state institutions, rather than ownership of private firms, can be the surest route to wealth and power in a developing society.

The framework is not without its critics. The scholar John Saul argued that Alavi neglected the role of ideology in holding the capitalist system together, while Colin Leys reopened the whole question of how “overdeveloped” these states really were. Others note that globalisation, the spread of media, and the rise of powerful non-state actors have steadily eroded the autonomy of the state, weakening the overdeveloped character that Alavi described. Even so, the basic move these scholars made, treating the post-colonial state as a relatively independent force shaped by its colonial inheritance rather than as a passive tool, remains a foundational lens in comparative politics.

What do you think? Does the idea of a “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” still capture how power works in developing societies today, or has the rise of global capital and private business shifted the balance away from the state? And if the post-colonial state truly mediates between competing classes, whose interests do you think it ends up serving most consistently?

References

1. https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/nicos-poulantzas
2. https://newleftreview.org/issues/i74/articles/hamza-alavi-the-state-in-post-colonial-societies-pakistan-and-bangladesh.pdf
3. https://adarshbadri.me/notes/hamza-alavi-overdeveloped-postcolonial-state/
4. https://www.ukessays.com/essays/history/post-colonial-society-hamza-alvi-history-essay.php
5. https://www.studocu.com/in/document/banaras-hindu-university/ba-hons-social-sciences/hamza-alavi-and-post-colonial-state/6058498
6. https://allafrica.com/stories/200901270487.html
7. https://www.tzaffairs.org/1976/07/analysis-of-tanzanian-socialism/
8. https://www.rajulsingh.in/post/understanding-alavi-s-post-colonial-state