Black Marxism

Book Review

Cedric Robinson, author of Black Marxism, speaking at a rally in 2006. Photo by Doc Seals, this file is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Note: I wrote this last summer, I never sent it out because I felt like I needed to read the work again to really comment on it in depth. But since I’m on the road now and won’t have much time for posting, here are my thoughts at the time. I think Cedric Robinson is overly critical of Marx and Engels, especially in his preface, but his work covers a very important topic and was groundbreaking.

I just finished reading Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. There can be no doubt that Cedric Robinson was a man of extraordinary understanding and talent. When he presented his doctoral thesis in 1971, several members of the committee resigned because of “an inability to understand the work.” I felt much the same way struggling through parts of Black Marxism. I believe it’s an important piece of work that has been largely overlooked, even on the left. What follows are simply a few thoughts of mine following my reading of it.

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

First published in 1983, Black Marxism is both a critique and a validation of Marx. Cedric Robinson takes both Marx and Engels to task on their Eurocentric vision, critiquing the fundamentals of Marxism. But he goes on to expand upon Marxism and present an even more radical critique of capitalism than even that found in Capital. The work is best remembered for its popularization of the term racial capitalism and explanation of the birth of both capitalism and racism. But it is much more than that, as Robinson covers some of the greatest Black Marxist thinkers of the 20th century.

In his preface to the 2000 edition, Cedric Robinson does not hold back when talking of Marx and Engels:

The "masses" whom Marx presumed would be "seized" by theory were European
male wage laborers and artisans in the metropoles of western Europe, Britain, and the United States. Here both theory and Marx's casting of historical materialism betrayed him. Instead of the anarchic globalism of modern capitalist production and exchange, Marx imagined a coherent ordering of things: congruous imperial sites from which cohorts of capitalists cultivated, directed, and dominated satellite societies.

Driven, however, by the need to achieve the scientific elegance and interpretive economy demanded by theory, Marx consigned race, gender, culture, and history to the dustbin. Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation.

I actually find Robinson to be more critical of Marx in this preface than in his actual work. These words make it seem as if Black Marxism is a simple refutation of Marx, but in many ways it is simply an expansion of Marxist thought. Robinson backs this up as he concludes his preface saying:

Black Marxism was not a site of contestation between Marxism and the tradition, nor a revision. It was a new vision centered on a theory of the cultural corruption of race. And thus the reach and cross-fertilization of the tradition became evident in the anticolonial and revolutionary struggles of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

The book itself is divided into three parts. Part 1 covers the origins of racialism and capitalism and their merger into racial capitalism.

Part 1: The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism

In this section, Robinson describes in detail the birth of capitalism as it evolved from the Feudal system. In his introduction to the 2000 edition, Robin DG Kelley describes it:

Instead, Robinson explains, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and grew in fits and starts, flowering in the cultural soil of the West-most notably in the racialism that has come to characterize European society. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.

While Marx was aware of this exploitation, he primarily focused on the proletariat in Europe. In this section, Robinson critiques Marx for this Eurocentric vision and explains the birth of racialization even while remaining focused primarily on Europe himself. This is very difficult to digest for it brings a different view to history than that even most of the left are aware of. For instance, Robinson defines racism:

Racism, I maintain, was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the "internal" relations of European peoples.

This challenges more traditional views of the origin of racism and does much to explain the lack of unity amongst the proletariat. This was something which Marx struggled with explaining later in his career. For Robinson, the racialized nature of capitalism tends to divide the working class rather than unite it. While Marx focused on the united class interests of the proletariat, Robinson shows how these class interests were never realized. It is a difficult concept to grasp, that capitalism was racial before the concept of race existed.

Robinson also challenges the notion that capitalism was a negation of feudalism. As he writes:

Indeed, capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world's political and economic relations.

He sees capitalism as an evolution from feudalism, carrying many of its social characteristics but with a change in the means of production.

Part 2: The Roots of Black Radicalism

As Robinson describes it:

Part II takes up this other radical tradition, Black radicalism, the conditions of its
historical emergence, its forms, and its nature.

This is where Robinson moves beyond Europe and Western thought and begins to detail what he means by the Black radical tradition.

The creation of the Negro was obviously at the cost of immense expenditures of
psychic and intellectual energies in the West. The exercise was obligatory. It was an
effort commensurate with the importance Black labor power possessed for the world economy sculpted and dominated by the ruling and mercantile classes of Western Europe.

He also goes on to tie slavery into capitalism. Something which Marx did not put as much emphasis on.

For more than 300 years slave labor persisted beyond the beginnings of modern capitalism, complementing wage labor, peonage, serfdom, and other methods of labor coercion. Ultimately, this meant that the interpretation of history in terms of the dialectic of capitalist class struggles would prove inadequate, a mistake ordained by the preoccupation of Marxism with the industrial and manufacturing centers of capitalism; a mistake founded on the presumptions that Europe itself had produced, that the motive and material forces that generated the capitalist system were to be wholly located in what was a fictive historical entity. From its very foundations capitalism had never been-any more than Europe-a "closed system."

Part 3: Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory

Cedric Robinson describes this third section:

The third and final section of this study traces the social and intellectual back-
grounds of the processes that led to the theoretical articulation of Black radicalism.

In this section, Robinson chose three Black radical intellectuals: William Edward Burkhardt (WEB) Du Bois, Cyril Lionel Robert (CLR) James, and Richard Nathaniel Wright. Of these three, I was only familiar with WEB Du Bois and CLR James, two of the greatest Marxist writers of the 20th century.

Richard Wright was a fiction writer who also contributed greatly to Black Marxist thought. I appreciate Robinson include Wright, even though I was not familiar with his work, fiction can be just as important as theory. Trotsky actually wrote a book entitled Literature and Revolution.

Conclusion

In the final chapter, Robinson brings the three preceding section together. If you want to know what Black Marxism is about but don’t have time to read the whole 318 pages, I suggest reading this chapter.

Robinson writes here:

For 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the capitalist
mode of production in Europe engulfed agrarian and artisanal workers, transforming them over the generations into expropriated, dependent fodder for concentration in factories, disciplined to the rhythms and turbulences of the manufacturing process, the organizers of the capitalist world system appropriated Black labor power as constant capital. Blacks were extracted from their social formations through mechanisms that, by design and historical coincidence, minimized the disruption of the production of labor.

This is the essence of racial capitalism. He goes on to describe the Black radical tradition as well:

Even then, the more fundamental impulse of Black resistance was the preservation of a particular social and historical consciousness rather than the revolutionary transformation of feudal or merchant capitalist Europe. Why the pathology of race was so dominant a part of Western consciousness or what might be done to change that character was of less concern than how Black peoples might survive the encounter.

The critique of the capitalist world system acquired determinant force not from movements of industrial workers in the metropoles but from those of the "backward" peoples of the world. Only an inherited but rationalized racial arrogance and a romanticism stiffened by pseudo-science could manage to legitimate a denial of these occurrences. Western Marxism, in either of its two variants-critical-humanist or scientific-has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation.

As Robin DG Kelley writes, “Black Marxism is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist. It is a dialectical critique of Marxism that turns to the long history of Black revolt—and to Black radical intellectuals who also turned to the history of Black revolt—to construct a wholly original theory of revolution and interpretation of the history of the modern world.”

In conclusion, racial capitalism is something we all need to understand. Black Marxism does an excellent job of diving into this topic and the history related to it. Everyone needs to understand the underlying ties between racism and capitalism and how these two systems are interwoven. As Marx said, “Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”