# Conclusion: Black studies and the elision of political economy  
By the late 1980s, when black studies had become more or less institutionalized, there was a noted and distinct absence of Marxist, historical materialist, and critical political economic analysis of blackness in its formulation. The discipline tended to ignore or marginalize the study of economic agency, economic resistance, the failure of the market, the relationship between labour and exploitation, and economic development (or the lack thereof) in black communities in the United States of America and in the black world. The organization of black studies around the analytic of 'diaspora' reified the cultural specifications of blackness through the transnationalization of the study of black sociality and culture.  
The shift in global accumulation - that is, the transformation of capital from its liberal to corporate form - precipitated by the 1973 world recession and oil crisis, the declining rate of profit, deindustrialization in the global North, and a looming debt crisis in the global South had homologous, albeit geospatially specific, effects on all peoples of African descent. The emphasis on cultural affinity and connection in black studies neglected the convergence of the material experiences in the structural organization of political economy among blacks in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Africa, and the Caribbean in the wake of a neoliberal agenda that produced a rollback of the state and its reformulation. This was instantiated through Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and structural adjustment that accompanied the collapse of the socialist/communist alternative. Despite this global restructuring, popular and scholarly understandings of American and 'diasporic' blackness rejected critical political economy. In other words, black studies failed to incorporate a structural and material critique of globalization that could have provided a deeper understanding of the ways in which black people have been linked historically through the global axial division of labour.