By Bernard E. Harcourt
We now reach, on our year-long journey, the most famous political economic writings of Marx—first, his publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859 and, second, the release of his magnum opus, Capital, Volume I, in 1867. There is, of course, more to come, including not only the three other volumes of Capital published posthumously, as well as Marx’s writings on the Paris uprising during the Commune (The Civil War in France, 1871) and the voluminous “Late Marx” writings. But for now, we can at least imagine that we have covered the young and mature Marx—and have in our grasp what most people refer to when they critique Marx or Marxism.
In this session, Marx 10/13, we read Marx through the lens of Cedric Robinson’s landmark work, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.[1] Although famous today, Robinson’s book almost fell through the cracks when it was published, and likely would have had it not been for a provocative book review published in the Monthly Review in 1988 by Cornel West, who at the time was professor of religion and director of the Afro-American Studies Program at Princeton University.
Cornel West shattered what critics would later call the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded Robinson’s book. In West’s characteristic way, he propelled Black Marxism into contemporary debate.[2] For this and many other reasons, it is an absolute privilege and honor to welcome our dear colleague and friend—and a faithful friend to these 13/13 seminars—Dr. Cornel West, back to Columbia University and to Marx 13/13. Cornel West has just come off his 2024 Presidential campaign with the “Justice for All Party.” I am delighted to welcome Dr. West back to our intellectual community and the 13/13 series.
Dr. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary, our affiliated school of divinity. A former University Professor at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Dr. West has written paradigm-shifting work in over 20 books, including the classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters. Dr. West is also a musician and lover of music and has produced three music albums: On Sketches of My Culture, Street Knowledge, and Never Forget – in collaboration with artists such as Prince, Andre 3000, Jill Scott, and many others. It is thrilling to have Cornel West with us today to read and discuss Marx’s mature writings in conversation with Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism.
In this full-length introduction, I will set the background to our conversation with Cornel West by giving some context to the two Marx texts, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital, Volume I, and to Robinson’s book, Black Marxism.
I would like to start though, even before discussing the Marx texts, with a disclaimer about Black Marxism, especially for those who have not yet gotten through the lengthy 436-page book.
Framing Black Marxism
The title of Cedric Robinson’s book, Black Marxism, is a bit misleading, I would argue, and this may account for its delayed reception. Despite its title, the book does not propose a variant, or a strand, or an offshoot of Marxism that would account for the black experience. It does not advocate for a new version of Marxism—by contrast to the many other Marxist projects. It operates in a very different way than most Marxisms.
Most forms of Marxism, whether past or present—by which I mean, offshoots from the original, narrow, Engelsian Marxism (the classical Marxism that Friedrich Engels constructed after Marx’s death, involving e.g. the doctrines of “historical materialism” and “dictatorship of the proletariat”)—start with a critique of a certain aspect of Marx’s writings or a critique of other Marxisms, but then effectively appropriate Marx for themselves. They claim to be the true or genuine Marxists, the more comprehensive Marxists, the authentic Marx. Feminist Marxism and the wages-for-housework movement, for example, which we discussed at Marx 6/13, starts with a critique of Marx for failing to pay sufficient attention to social reproduction by contrast to industrial production; but by the end of the critique, it has transformed itself into the more compelling or genuine expression of Marxism—at a minimum, into one leading strand of Marxism—that proposes a feminist communist horizon. Similarly, Transgender Marxism, as we discussed at Marx 5/13, starts from the criticism that Marx’s writings do not adequately address the questions of sexuality, gender, and the family; but it develops into a form of transgender communism that aspires to be a leading voice within Marxism, not just a peripheral or marginalized voice or tag-along. Many other forms of Marxism that built on the original edifice as well have sought to be a correct reading of Marx, whether it is Analytical Marxism or Leninist-Marxism, or even Stalinism, which claimed “diamat” (the theory of dialectical materialism that Stalin developed in the chapter “Dialectical and Historical Materialism”) as the official Marxist doctrine.
By contrast, Robinson’s Black Marxism has no ambition to be a strand of Marxism, nor to be genuinely Marxist. It too begins with a critique of Marx, namely its Eurocentrism, but it does not claim to reconstitute a form of Marxism. Instead, it unearths a history of European racialism that Marx ignored and develops instead a Black Radical tradition that is intended to be independent and autonomous of Marxism, even if it is in conversation with Marx’s writings. The Black radical tradition is precisely not a form of Black Marxism. It is not a branch of Marxism.
In this sense, Robinson’s ambition is much closer to Frantz Fanon’s project to displace the western industrial worker by the wretched of the earth. Fanon had no intention of creating a post-colonial Marxism, he was too busy writing and participating in the struggle for Algerian liberation. In a similar way, Robinson’s ambition was far greater than developing a branch of Marxism or even Black Marxism. He was much more interested, instead, in a separate and autonomous development, going back centuries and spanning the globe, that he called the Black radical tradition.
I think it is important to start there in order to better situate our seminar discussion. With that, then, let me turn to our texts.
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
In February 1857, as he was completing the sixth of the seven notebooks that would comprise the Grundrisse, Marx began to seek out an editor to publish the work and its elaboration in German.[3] Marx had the ambition of publishing his work in a 6 volume book series. He had initially set the contours of the larger multivolume book project at the end of his “Introduction” to the Grundrisse, as noted in our introduction to the Grundrisse from Marx 9/13. There, Marx had formulated the following plan for the multivolume series as follows:
The order obviously has to be (1) the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society, but in the above-explained sense [in the Grundrisse]. (2) The categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their interrelation. Town and country. The three great social classes. Exchange between them. Circulation. Credit system (private). (3) Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state. Viewed in relation to itself. The ‘unproductive’ classes. Taxes. State debt. Public credit. The population. The colonies. Emigration. (4) The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. (5) The world market and crises.[4]
Marx boiled this down to a simpler 6-book outline in a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle dated February 22, 1858—the overall project he described as “a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system.”[5] Marx outlined the 6 books as follows:
The whole is divided into 6 books: 1. On Capital (contains a few introductory Chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market.[6]
By the following month, March 1858, Marx had secured a publisher in Berlin by the name of Duncker, and agreed to turn over the manuscript in pieces to be printed in installments.
By contrast to the Grundrisse, which started with one chapter on money and another on capital, Marx planned to begin the first book of the series (On Capital) with three chapters: (1) Value; (2) Money; and (3) Capital in General (the process of production of capital; process of its circulation; the unity of the two, or capital and profit; interest).[7] Marx worked on these parts, sending them off to the printer in January 1859. Ultimately, he reduced them to two chapters: the first titled “The Commodity” and the second titled “Money or Simple Circulation.”
Only the first installment would ultimately be published in June 1859 under the title Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erstes Heft (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. First Part). The subtitle of the book was: Book One: On Capital. Section One: Capital in General. It contained a “Preface” and two chapters (“The Commodity” and “Money or Simple Circulation”), as well as notes in annex and appendices. It should be intuitively obvious how the work gradually takes the shape that it does: starting with commodities and then turning to money before discussing capital. I will come back to that in a moment.
An English translation was first published in Chicago in 1904 by Charles H. Kerr & Company.
Most readers of Marx are only familiar with the “Preface” to the book, which is renowned for containing Marx’s intellectual autobiography and the famous statement of what became known as “historical materialism.”
The Preface
The “Preface” is a tour de force that contains both Marx’s short but comprehensive retrospective on his intellectual journey—much of which I have quoted separately in the previous introductions—and a succinct restatement of his material theory of history.
First, Marx simply states the six volumes that he intends to publish—stating: “I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market.”[8]
Then, Marx recounts his intellectual journey and how it led him to study political economy. It is in the middle of that account that he sets forth the summary of his theory of history. It is well known, but I include it here, at this point, since it was written in January 1859 and fits in the chronology right here:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.[9]
Following the publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. First Part, in 1859, Marx continued, on-and-off, to draft subsequent parts of the intended books.
The draft manuscripts for the immediate next part, the third intended chapter on capital in general, mushroomed into 23 notebooks that Marx titled A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Third Chapter, Capital in General, but that he would not publish. These are generally referred to as the 1861-1863 manuscripts.[10] They were not published by Marx. They included the Theories of Surplus Value that Karl Kautsky published in 1905-1910 as Volume IV of Capital.[11]
Capital, Volume I
In 1867, Marx publishes the first volume of Capital.
To recall, the Contribution had two chapters (“The Commodity” and “Money or Simple Circulation”). It should be intuitively obvious how that framework would gradually take the shape that it does in Capital: starting with commodities and then turning to money before discussing capital. That is, after all, the best framework to understand the C-M-C formula which Marx starts with in Capital, chapter 4, a few years later, which he calls “the simplest form of the circulation of commodities,” i.e. “the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in order to buy.”[12]
Marx wrote that he intended Capital as a continuation of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. First Part, which had appeared eight years earlier in 1859. He indicated that “The substance of that earlier work is summarised in the first three chapters of this volume.”[13]
Now, the idea of giving an introduction to Capital, Volume I in a thousand words seems preposterous. I am considering making next year’s 13/13 series entirely about Capital since we are not going to have the proper amount of time in these final seminars to discuss Capital properly (especially because we are turning to the Late Marx, which is today such a rich topic, with Kohei Saito, Bruno Bosteels, and Étienne Balibar). So we cannot here do justice to Capital, Volume I. I will try to write a separate long-form introduction shortly.
Here, I will not even try to give an introduction to the other volumes of Capital. But I will say this, just to prefigure the posthumous works. Marx intended Capital to consist of four books distributed over three volumes. The four books included: (1) The Process of Capitalist Production; (2) The Process of Capitalist Circulation; (3) The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (in other words, the interrelationship of production and circulation); and (4) A History of Theories of Surplus-Value. Marx only published the first volume during his lifetime. Engels published the second two planned books as Volumes II and III. Kautsky published the final book on theories of surplus-value as Volume IV.
Let us now read Marx’s mature work in conversation with Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Cedric Robinson, a professor of political science and Black Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, publishes Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition in 1983 with the University of North Carolina Press, an academic press with a leading reputation in the field of history. The subtitle of the book contains an allusion to the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson’s famous book, The Making of the English Working Class, which serves as the main foil in the second chapter of Black Marxism. It is central to Robinson’s argument that Thompson failed to recognize the role of race in the construction of the industrial English working class—here, specifically, the role of the racial hierarchies that subjugated “the Irish ‘race’” and ignored the race struggles between “the two ‘races’ in the working class,” namely the Irish and the English, in the making of the English working class.[14]
Cedric Robinson’s book operates in three movements, which correspond to the three parts of the book. First, Robinson pushes back several centuries the context for the emergence of capitalism in Europe and demonstrates the centrality of the “race” wars to European history—the race wars going back to the struggles in the ninth and tenth centuries between peoples such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Vandals, the Burgundis, the Frank peoples, in the remnants of the Roman empire.[15] Drawing on the research of medieval historians such as Henri Pirenne, of the Annales school of historiography especially Fernand Braudel, and of the world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, Robinson offers an alternative arc to the conventional history of capitalism—alternative, that is, to the traditional Marxist emphasis on European industrialization and that moment, at the turn of the nineteenth century, that gave birth to the industrial working class.
Robinson conducts, in effect, a history of European racialism that serves as a genealogy of capitalism. By stretching the time frame back to the medieval and pre-medieval period, and loosening the connection to industrialization, Robinson spotlights, at the heart of the movement toward capitalism, the struggles between “peoples,” or between “races” as they are referred to, during the medieval period, which resulted in slavery and the slave trade of, at the time, predominantly European and Mediterranean persons.[16] He highlights, in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the importance of “Tartar, Greek, Armenian, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Circassian, Slavonic, Cretan, Arab, African (Mori), and occasionally Chinese (Cathay) slaves—two thirds of whom were female” in the homes and fields of southern Europe.[17] In a sense, Robinson eases the western reader, in the first part of the book, into the role that slavery, and especially slavery of African peoples, will play in his genealogy of capitalism. He does so by starting centuries earlier than chattel slavery in the Americas and showing the predominance of European enslaved persons in the economies of Southern Europe. As noted earlier, Robinson follows that up with a chapter on E. P. Thompson, where he underscores the role of the “race war” between the Irish and English in the making of the English working class—again, easing the western reader with the struggles between two European “races.”
For those who are familiar with Michel Foucault’s work, Robinson’s genealogy overlaps in part Foucault’s argument in his Collège de France lectures in 1976, “Society Must Be Defended,” that the emergence of social defense theories in the nineteenth century were the outgrowth of the race wars of the pre-Medieval and Medieval periods.[18] Foucault focused in 1976 on the Franks, the Gauls, the Celts, and the other peoples of northern and southern Europe who were the center of attention of a historical discourse about race war or race struggle—what he referred to as “that old discourse, already hundreds of years old, presented in sociobiological terms, that was reworked for purposes of social conservatism and […] colonial domination.”[19]
Foucault’s intervention there was to ask how it came about that the race wars were replaced by class struggle—how the race wars metamorphized into class wars. He specifically refers to Marx’s acknowledgement in a letter (written to Joseph Weydemeyer on 5 March 1852[20], discussed in Marx 8/13) that he had not been the first to identify class struggle, but that instead the French bourgeois historians (especially Augustin Thierry) had done that long before him. Foucault gets his references crossed in his 1976 lectures, citing instead to a letter to Engels in 1882—he is clearly quoting from memory—but the slip is fruitful because, perhaps unintentionally but very productively, Foucault brings into the conversation explicitly the question of race wars. He recalls ad lib Marx’s letter in the following terms: “You know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle.”[21]
So Foucault, in 1976, draws a direct line between race wars and Marxist class struggle—or what he refers to as “the time when the notion of race struggle was about to be replaced by that of class struggle.”[22] Foucault locates that “in the first half of the nineteenth century, as it was [Adolphe Thiers] who transformed race struggle into class struggle” in his 10 volume history of the French Revolution published in 1823-1827.[23] Incidentally, for anyone interested in this, the French political theorist Florence Hulak discusses this in detail in her new book L’Histoire libérale de la modernité. Race, nation, classe.[24]
Now, for Foucault this leads to a short discussion of colonization, colonizing genocide, Nazism, Soviet state racism, and modern racism;[25] as well as a much longer discussion of social defense theory and the creation of the concept of the internal enemy.
For Cedric Robinson, though, the discussion does not end there. Robinson explores how those early race wars (in the run up to the Middle Ages) metamorphize into the enslavement and conquest of African people and indigenous people in the Americas, the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, plantations, and ultimately the racialized formation of industrial labor. For Robinson, the race wars form the basis for an alternative genealogy of capitalism.
By the end of the first part, Robinson has outlined four parts to this genealogy of European racialism—only the first two of which reside mostly in the field of European history, the last two being more global and worldly. The first period predates the Middle Ages but extends into them and into feudalism. It is the early formative period of the race wars already discussed, and what he calls the “’blood’ and racial beliefs and legends.”[26] The second period covers the gradual dominance of Arab, Ottoman, and African cultures over the Mediterranean basin, bringing about the “Dark Ages” in Europe. The third period consists of the emergence of merchant capitalism from late feudalism and the development of a world system (à la Wallerstein) overtaking Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The fourth period, Robinson labels “the dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery, and resistance from the sixteenth century forward, and the formations of industrial labor and labor reserves.”[27]
Robinson’s point is that these four moments of European racialism shaped the social relations of production at all the different economic stages. They serve as the context within which capitalism emerged. As he writes, “Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal, and capitalist social structures, forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences.”[28]
Having discussed the first moment in the first part of the book, Robinson elaborates on the other three moments in the second part of the book. This is where he recounts, first, the stages of capitalist development grounded on slavery, on the slave trade, and on the dehumanization of African peoples. Robinson traces how European merchants and entrepreneurs substituted enslaved persons for commodities and how the slave trade transformed mercantile into industrial capitalism.[29] This is the work that we are familiar with today under the rubric of “racial capitalism.” Cedric Robinson uses that term from the inception of his book, right on the second page and throughout. In large part, Robinson coined the usage of the term racial capitalism, even if others had employed the term earlier. One of the first scholars to popularize the term was Neville Alexander, a South African revolutionary who spent a decade on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela. Alexander used the term in the 1970s to describe the South African apartheid political economy. He deployed it in a dual way to confront both Marxists and liberals. As Karen Engle explains, “Alexander theorized racial capitalism to argue against liberal claims that apartheid could be ended without ending capitalism, on one hand, and Marxist claims that dismantling capitalism would necessarily lead to racial equality, on the other.”[30]
Part II, though, does more than trace the oppressive dimensions of racialism in the later periods and outside of the European context. It also spotlights the forms of resistance and the struggles of Black peoples, thereby setting the stage for the Black radical tradition as opposed to Western radicalism—and, in the third part, the intellectual and theoretical contributions of Black radical thinkers. In a similar manner to the way in which W.E.B. Du Bois transformed the enslaved Black people into the agents of emancipation in Black Reconstruction in America (as we discussed in Marx 7/13 with Gayatri Spivak), Robinson documents the pervasive forms of Black resistance from the sixteenth century onwards in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, the British and French Guianas, the British West Indies, the Dutch Suriname, and throughout North America. Throughout these analyses, Robinson is constantly trying to extract, in his words, “the ideological, philosophical, and epistemological natures of the Black movement whose dialectical matrix we believe was capitalist slavery and imperialism.”[31] And what he finds is an ethic tied to an African tradition: no mass violence, violence turned inward, far from what the Westerners thought would have been necessary, and also, as Robinson notes, much less brutal than what Fanon proposed. This was not, he writes, “the ‘fratricide’ of Fanon’s extended Freudianism.”[32]
“It becomes clear, then,” Robinson writes, “that for the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, it was an African tradition that grounded collective resistance by Blacks to slavery and colonial imperialism.”[33] This African tradition, Robinson maintains, privileged the mind over the body, the metaphysical over the material, and escape, resettlement, or suicide over violence and assault.[34] Robinson refers to it in terms of “mind, metaphysics, ideology, consciousness.”[35] He summarizes it as “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”[36]
This Black radical tradition is different in important ways from Western Marxism and European radicalism (personified in revolutionaries like Lenin, Mao, Fidel, Lumumba, or Ho Chi Minh[37]); and it stood against the official European ways of thinking and being. It had been subjugated by the latter, and did not resonate with the former. It has an entirely different culture, sensibility, ethos, philosophy, symbolism, semiotics, and epistemology than Western Marxism. As Robinson writes:
The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and re-formed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. It gave them cause to question the authority of a radical intelligentsia drawn by its own analyses from marginal and ambiguous social strata to construct an adequate manifestation of proletarian power. And it drew them more and more toward the actual discourse of revolutionary masses, the impulse to make history in their own terms. And finally, the Black radical tradition forced them to reevaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness. After all it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women opposed enslavement.[38]
The Black radical tradition, Robinson concludes, has a life of its own, independent and autonomous from European radical traditions and entirely distinct from Marxism.
That then brings Robinson to analyze, in the third part of the book, the radical thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright, three brilliant critical philosophers who engaged Marx’s writings and the Marxist tradition of critique and praxis. (For those who are interested, we studied W.E.B. Du Bois earlier this year at Marx 7/13 and previously, with Gayatri Spivak, Bob Gooding-Williams, and others, throughout Abolition Democracy 13/13. We studied C.L.R. James with Adom Getachew a few years ago at Revolution 2/13. And we discussed Richard Wright with Biodun Jeyifo at Revolution 1/13, in the context of the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists held at the Sorbonne in Paris in September 1956.)
To stay with Du Bois, as we saw earlier, Du Bois developed a framework in Black Reconstruction in America in 1935 that directly engaged Marx’s theories of class struggle, of counterrevolution, and of emancipation. Amy Allen’s essay “Slavery, Work, and Property: Du Bois’s Black Marxism,” written for Abolition Democracy 5/13, is particularly enlightening on this question.
What Robinson does is to trace the way in which Du Bois gradually distances himself from the Marxist tradition and comes to embrace the Black radical tradition. Through a meticulous analysis of Du Bois’s writings and of the historical context regarding the relationships between labor unions, the American communist party, Lenin and the Comintern on the Black Question, and Blacks in America, Robinson demonstrates how Du Bois is better interpreted within the Black radical tradition, especially by the end of his life. So, Robinson concludes: “Du Bois, despite all the diversions and distractions of intellect, social origins, and ambition that had marked his even then long life, had at last come to the Black radical tradition.”[39]
Let me then conclude this discussion of Cedric Robinson’s book with a telling passage from his own conclusion:
When Du Bois and James set about the recovery of the history of the revolutionary Black struggle, they were driven from an implied to an explicit critique of Marxism. […] It appeared to them that Western Marxists, unconsciously bound by a Eurocentric perspective, could not account for nor correctly assess the revolutionary forces emerging from the Third World. The racial metaphysics of Western consciousness—the legacy of a civilization—shielded their fellow socialists from the recognition of racialism’s influence on the development and structure of the capitalist system…[40]
Reception of Robinson’s Black Marxism
Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism was published in 1983 by an esteemed academic press known for the highest quality historical work. However, the book received little attention at first. There was, what some critics have called, “a conspiracy of silence.”[41] A protracted silence, at least until Cornel West publishes a landmark book review of Black Marxism in the Monthly Review, in September 1988, both praising and critiquing the work.[42] “Robinson’s book is a towering achievement,” West writes. “There is simply nothing like it in the history of black radical thought.”[43] And with that, Cornel West’s book review propelled Robinson’s Black Marxism into the heart of contemporary debates.
In his essay, Dr. West notes that Robinson’s book had fallen through the cracks, neglected both by scholars of Black studies and by the Left intelligentsia more broadly. He emphasizes that they ignore it at their peril—or at least, at the risk of sidestepping the most important questions of our times, namely how to engage properly in the struggle for emancipation. West highlights the import of Robinson’s main ambitions, in his words: “to show that efforts to understand black people’s history of resistance through the exclusive prism of Marxist analysis are incomplete and inaccurate;”[44]and “to contribute to the freedom struggle of oppressed people by exploring the ways in which the Marxist tradition—indispensable for the struggle—may impede it through its Eurocentric focuses.”[45]
Dr. West was more enamored by the first two parts of the book than the third. Regarding Robinson’s analysis of European racialism, West lauds Robinson for highlighting the failure of European and Marxist radical thought to account for the place of race and racialism in their historical narratives. With regard to the Black radical tradition of resistance, West underscores how Robinson unearthed distinct praxes of Black struggle. “Robinson is right,” West writes, “to accentuate the non-European sources of black resistance.”[46]
With a note of caution, West gestures to the potential danger of an overly rosy view of the Black radical tradition—or, in his words, of “a romantic, idealized conception of a monolithic and homogenous African past free of social contradictions, cultural blindnesses, and economic injustices.”[47] West suggests that Robinson came close to falling into this trap “when he claims that indiscriminate violence and brutality ‘did not come naturally to African peoples’ due to the resolution of conflict in Africa by means of migration and resettlement rather than by fratricidal warfare as in Europe.”[48] Despite this, West appreciates the project of disarticulating or untangling the Black radical tradition from a Marxist framework.
By contrast, regarding the third part of Robinson’s book, Dr. West does not find Robinson’s reading of Du Bois, C.L.R. James, or Richard Wright legible. Du Bois’s relation to the Black nationalist perspective was far more fraught, West writes. C.L.R. James remained, in his own words, a “black European” through and through. And Wright’s protagonists, such as Bigger Thomas, were individualistic and atomistic, hardly contributing to the creation of a Black community (and Bigger Thomas, West reminds us, murdered his Black girlfriend Bessie).[49]
Despite these disagreements, Cornel West uplifts Robinson’s book because of the work it does: to push us to confront the most important questions today, namely how to understand and imagine the struggle of oppressed peoples. West concludes: “Robinson’s efforts make us recognize that this deepening [of reflection] in regard to race is the only avenue to follow if Marxism and black radicalism are to be vital in the years to come.”[50]
As this last passage makes clear, West retains more attachment to Marxism than, I think, Robinson. According to West, Robinson was not rejecting Marxism entirely. “Robinson does not reject Marxist analyses,” West writes, “but wants to use a Marxist method in order to discredit Eurocentric practitioners of Marxism.”[51]
This raises an important question about Robinson’s method—which I am not sure I would characterize as Marxist. The roles of culture and ideology seem to play a far greater role in Robinson’s portrayal of a Black radical tradition. Robinson—with Braudel—also fractures the classical periodizations that are tied to changing modes of production. This raises many questions, the chief of which is, ultimately, the relation between the Black radical tradition as articulated by Cedric Robinson and the writings of Marx. Important questions that we will need to address at our next seminar!
Welcome to Marx 10/13!
Watch the seminar with Cornel West here.
Notes
[1] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).
[2] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Foreword,” in Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. xv.
[3] See, generally, Introductory note from Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 29, online here: https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/A_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy#:~:text=An%20important%20landmark%20in%20the,were%20also%20presented%20more%20profoundly.
[4] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), at p. 108.
[5] Karl Marx, Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle in Düsseldorf, 22 February 1858, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40, p. 268, online here: https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Ferdinand_Lassalle,_February_22,_1858.
[6] Marx, Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle in Düsseldorf, 22 February 1858.
[7] See Introductory note from Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 29.
[8] Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977) available online here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.
[9] Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
[10] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Manuscripts of 1861-63)” online here: https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/A_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy_(Manuscripts_of_1861-63).
[11] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value. Books I, II, and III (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000).
[12] Karl Marx, Capital. Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), at p. 247.
[13] Karl Marx, “Preface to the First German Edition,” Capital, Volume I, 1867, available online at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Capital,_Volume_I/00/Prefaces_and_Afterwords.
[14] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 39.
[15] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 11.
[16] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 16.
[17] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 16.
[18] Michel Foucault,“Society Must Be Defended,” ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
[19] Foucault,“Society Must Be Defended,” at p. 65.
[20] Marx Lettter to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Joseph_Weydemeyer,_March_5,_1852; Marx, “Class Struggle and Mode of Production,” in Robert C. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition (W.W. Norton, 1978), at p. 220.
[21] Foucault,“Society Must Be Defended,” at p. 65; and see id. at p. 85, n.6.
[22] Foucault,“Society Must Be Defended,” at p. 80.
[23] Foucault,“Society Must Be Defended,” at p. 80.
[24] Florence Hulak, L’Histoire libérale de la modernité. Race, nation, classe (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2023).
[25] Foucault,“Society Must Be Defended,” at p. 254-263; p. 103-104; and p. 81-84.
[26] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 67.
[27] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 67.
[28] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 66.
[29] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 116.
[30] Karen Engle, “Introduction,” in Hierarchies at Work: Race, World Systems, and Legal Distributional Analysis, eds. Karen Engle and Neville Hoad (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming); see generally Zachary Levenson and Marcel Paret, “The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 46 (16): 3403–24 (2023), at doi:10.1080/01419870.2023.2219300.
[31] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 167.
[32] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 168.
[33] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 169.
[34] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 169.
[35] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 169.
[36] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 171.
[37] See discussion at Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 176.
[38] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 170-171.
[39] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 238.
[40] Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. 313.
[41] Kelley, “Foreword,” in Robinson, Black Marxism, at p. xv.
[42] Cornel West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” Monthly Review, September 1988, pp. 51-56, available online here: https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/mr/article/view/MR-040-04-1988-08_5/3052.
[43] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 51.
[44] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 52.
[45] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 56.
[46] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 53.
[47] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 54.
[48] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 54.
[49] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 55.
[50] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 56.
[51] West, “Black Radicalism and the Marxist Tradition,” at p. 52.
