Jeremy Dewar<\/i><\/p>\n
First published in Fifth International 21<\/p>\n
The killing of George Floyd by racist cop Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on 26 May 2020 revealed how far the liberation of the USA\u2019s Black citizens still had to go. Donald Trump\u2019s presidency had been marked by his repeated praise for the killer cops as heroes and his white supremacist supporters as \u201cgood people.\u201d But the response to the video of George Floyd\u2019s murder was on an unprecedented scale, not just in the USA but also in many countries around the world.<\/p>\n
The re-emergence of the mass antiracist and Black struggle in the USA over the past six or seven years has reignited an interest in the whole range of Black history not only in the States, but in Europe, the Caribbean and Africa. This has posed fundamental questions, such as how the struggle can be won, what constitutes a victory and the relationship between the prevalent racist ideology and capitalism itself.<\/p>\n
This is taking place at a time when the reforms of the last great Black struggle, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s\u201360s, have unravelled before the eyes of millions, revealing systemic racism in the police, courts and prison-industrial system, not to mention education, jobs, wealth distribution, housing, health, etc.<\/p>\n
Equally Trump\u2019s \u2018movement\u2019 revealed the poisoning of millions of poor and working class whites with the prejudices, myths and tropes of racism. And the long decades of tolerance of systemic oppression by white progressives, their hesitation to recognise its reality and to speak out against it \u2014 has led a new generation of activists, Black and white, to say \u201csilence is violence\u201d.<\/p>\n
As in previous periods, this is provoking a debate over race and class. If whatever reforms are passed end up strengthening systemic racism, if the white working class is endemically racist, at least in its large majority, if, as Derrick Bell puts it, racism is permanent, then should not the struggle against racism and for Black liberation take precedence over all others \u2014 at least for Black people?<\/p>\n
This of course is not a new argument. Black nationalism has been a constant political trend within the Black anti-racist movement from Marcus Garvey through Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party to today. On the left of that movement, more and more activists and intellectuals have openly identified with socialism and the ideas of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and to a lesser extent Leon Trotsky. This has increased over the century since Garvey\u2019s United Negro Improvement Association, as a Black middle class and small ruling class have emerged and developed in the US and a corrupt clientele capitalist ruling elite despoiled the hopes of successive African anti-colonial revolutionary masses.<\/p>\n
But in the 1980s as the Soviet Union went into terminal decline and China abandoned the radical Stalinism of Mao Zedong for the market, the prestige of Marxism as the key to liberation began to decline. Third Wordlists, like the Palestinian exile Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism and the Egyptian Samir Amin in in his 1988 book Eurocentrism, accused Marx and most Marxists of the title of Amin\u2019s book.<\/p>\n
Cedric Robinson\u2019s Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition (1983) is an early protagonist in that tradition and one of the most radical in that it rejects Marxism\u2019s analysis of exploitation, class formation and the agency of the working class in a socialist revolution. In short it is a pioneer work in the academy\u2019s desertion of Stalinised Marxism for postmodernism and poststructuralism. On this methodological base were founded departments devoted to new disciplines of Postcolonial and then Subaltern Studies.<\/p>\n
What Robinson hails and promotes is that Black activists and intellectuals break from Marxism to a supposedly classless Black radicalism. Unfortunately what he was obliged to do is to steal the fruits of the work of real Black Marxists, who, for all their clashes and difficulties with specific socialist and communist organisations, never themselves denied their debt or even their adherence to Marxism.<\/p>\n
He argues that, although Marxism offers \u201ca superior grammar for synthetizing the degradation of labour with the growing destabilization of capitalist production and accelerating technical development,\u201d he rejects historical materialism, based on the development of the forces of production, a scientific and objective analysis of capital as accumulated surplus value, and the class struggles within the relations of production. He claims that this analysis is intrinsically Eurocentric.<\/p>\n
Instead Robinson claims that, underlying historical development, there are deep-rooted ideologies, spanning whole continents of people, i.e. \u201craces\u201d, whose values, symbols and cultures permeate and ultimately transcend successive modes of production; even liberation movements and theories are conditioned ultimately by these \u201cspirits\u201d. Europe\u2019s is predominantly a racist, violent and antagonistic ideology whilst that of Africa and its diaspora is a unitary, collective and peaceful one.<\/p>\n
This identity is strongest among the diaspora and especially former slave colonies, so that its nationalism, Black nationalism can, Cedric Robinson claims, \u201ctranscend nationalism\u201d once it has broken free of all Western trappings, especially Marxism.<\/p>\n
While other peoples, \u201craces\u201d can find their own way to freedom and Black workers and peasants can give solidarity, a united struggle with the white, European and North American working class is barred, both from without, by white workers\u2019 racism, and from within, by Black workers\u2019 different conception of struggle and liberation. In fact Robinson conjures up a concoction of Black nationalism, utopian socialism and anarchist spontaneity to replace the Marxist arsenal of tactics and strategy. So what is this Marxism that Robinson fears so?<\/p>\n
We will argue that it is completely wrong to see Marx\u2019s political economy as essentially applying only to Europe. Certainly capitalism could only develop when certain material preconditions were in place, namely the concentration of capital by Europeans first in a merchant capitalist phase when the plunder of the Americas and the beginnings of the slave trade \u2014 events outside of Europe \u2014 played a necessary role, allied to the expropriation of the peasantry and the small producers inside Europe. Marx deals with this phase, that he calls primitive accumulation, in the Grundrisse and Capital.<\/p>\n
He shows how the penetration of capital into production, aided for hundreds of years by exploiting black slaves, first on tobacco and sugar and then on cotton plantations, led to the formation of a modern bourgeoisie and a proletariat. Their accumulated wealth and the need for political conditions for its remorseless growth propelled the capitalist class into a struggle with the old order, mobilising the peasant, artisan and working classes with revolutionary democratic and nationalist ideology. But scarcely had the bourgeoisie achieved victories in a handful of European countries and in North America, when the working class began to engage in a class struggle against it. Out of this emerged trade unionism, socialism and communism.<\/p>\n
The proletariat would be forced into a conflict with the ruling class, some times revolutionary, sometimes reformist, and this was on a local, national, regional and ultimately on world scale. And alongside it too emerged, thanks to the work of Marx and Engels, scientific socialism. Based on a critique of bourgeois political economy, various utopian socialisms and historical materialism, what this meant was that a socialist society, one that abolished exploitation and oppression had to be based on real existing social forces and their struggles, not by creating utopian communes outside of capitalist society.<\/p>\n
Yes indeed, Marx and Engels claimed that capital was a product of developments in Western Europe, and that it was destined to spread worldwide, in the process transforming different pre-capitalist economies into parts of a world capitalist economy. Events in the last 30 years should have proved this beyond all contradiction for those who have eyes to see. That this would not be an even or a uniform process would be discovered by a future generation of Marxists \u2014 and indeed by Marx himself in his latter years \u2014 when developments made this clear.<\/p>\n
They also maintained that, overall, capitalism\u2019s emergence was progressive, not in its culturally destructive and inhuman consequences which anyone who reads Capital will know Marx fully recognised, but because (a) its productive capacity created the possibility of ending poverty and establishing equality on a world scale and (b) it created a property-less working class whose interest it was to limit and abolish private property. And it would do so not in order to return to earlier forms of production or ownership but to plan the new means of production and exchange to fulfil human needs.<\/p>\n
As their work progressed in the 1860\u201380s, Marx in particular studied the economic systems into which capital was erupting: in Tsarist Russia, India, China, etc. Nor was this simply an economic analysis since they hailed the resistance of American slaves, Russian serfs, Indian sepoys, Chinese peasants and Irish Republicans as fully worthy of support against British colonialism. Engaged in building the world\u2019s first international working class organisation they pledged it to support these struggles. That their studies of Africa \u2014 the last continent to be \u201copened up\u201d to capital investment (rather than just plundered for human labour) \u2014 were much less developed does not indicate Eurocentrism, let alone German nationalism and racism; rather the \u201cscramble for Africa\u201d started after Marx\u2019s death. It is true that there were socialists in the Second International (1889\u20131914), especially in the colonising countries and the settler colonies, who defended this seizure and exploitation but these were generally the bitterest opponents of Marxism.<\/p>\n
Marxists, like Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, denounced this and called for European and North American workers to aid the liberation struggles of the colonial masses. They and the militants drawn to the Communist International analysed this as a new epoch of capitalism now truly on a world scale \u2014 imperialism. They recognised that this made Europe no longer the exclusive centre of the class struggle. Lenin also showed how the development of a labour aristocracy in the advanced (imperialist) economies had led to reformism and the complicity of an upper layer of the working class in the colonial acquisitions of their bosses and the inter-imperialist wars over its spoils. With such complicity came absorption by sections of the working class of the racist ideology manufactured by the ruling class to justify brutal exploitation and oppression of what they deemed \u201clower races\u201d.<\/p>\n
Lenin also realised how central in the new epoch were the nationalist struggles of oppressed peoples both in Europe (Russian minorities, Ireland) and increasingly in Europe\u2019s colonies, African and Asian. Nor did Lenin forget the black former slaves in the USA, suffering and fighting against the horrific racism of Jim Crow, arguing for special measures to win Black workers and intellectuals to communism. Lenin criticised white American communists for ignoring the oppression of their black class sisters and brothers in the supposed interests of class unity. He insisted that such unity could only be lastingly achieved on the basis of the relatively privileged white workers supporting and aiding the struggles of black workers \u2014 indeed all black people- against racism.<\/p>\n
Trotsky too had to do the same with his American followers in the 1930s. He also added an important element for understanding world developments \u2014 with his linked theories of uneven and combined development and permanent revolution. In these so-called backwards countries the workers and peasants did not have to await for some pre-ordained stages of capitalist development to unfold, but could have agency in a continuous revolution that would not only fulfil democratic and economic tasks that capitalism had not accomplished, because it was plundering the resources of these countries for the benefit of imperialist metropoles, but go on uninterruptedly to implement socialist measures.<\/p>\n
This brief outline of the revolutionary Marxist tradition regarding historical materialism, the class struggle, national and racial oppression and the role of national liberation struggles in the epoch of imperialism is important, because it is not elucidated in 400 pages of Robinson\u2019s book. Instead he takes swipes, sometimes merited, at the Stalinist degenerate tradition, while ignoring or misunderstanding the theoretical breakthroughs in Marxist theory.<\/p>\n
Robinson structures his argument in three main strands: a history of Western Europe from antiquity to capitalism; a history of slavery and slave revolts; and the emergence of a Black radical tradition, which replaces class with race as the fundamental contradiction of modern capitalism. Let us now look at his analysis.<\/p>\n
Robinson contends that the Western radical tradition, principally today Marxism, \u201cis a Western construction \u2014 a conceptualisation of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through their civilisation, their social orders and their cultures\u201d.<\/p>\n
Antiquity is his starting point. The Greeks had a racial hierarchy (Aristotle argued that barbarians were natural slaves), though Robinson admits they had \u201cno doctrines of white supremacy\u201d and the \u201cintense color prejudice of the modern world was lacking\u201d. With the Romans he has more trouble, as they clearly did not adopt a racial hierarchy, despite having more encounters with Africans, e.g. Hannibal. Nevertheless the Roman army boasted several black generals. The enslavement of war prisoners did not generate a justification based on skin colour. Not only were there white slaves aplenty but there were also African Emperors, notably Septimius Severus (193\u2013211 CE), who some modern writers have claimed was \u201cblack\u201d but was certainly not \u201cwhite\u201d. The problem with categorizing according to this modern \u201cracial\u201d binary is that skin colour simply did not exist as an important social differentiation in the later Roman world.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless Robinson contends that the Roman concept of the \u201cbarbarian\u201d introduced an \u201cother\u201d, feared and demonised outsiders, bent on destruction of their civilisation. In reality, Rome\u2019s term \u201cBarbarian\u201d served only to exclude all others in Europe; it was both diverse and in fact obscured the small threat that they posed (e.g. there were only 100,000 Visigoths against 50-70 million in the Empire). Some discriminatory laws were passed, mostly against the Goths and the Germanic tribes but these were closely related to military objectives, which changed over time. In fact there was very little discrimination of Black Africans.<\/p>\n
But for Robinson, it is after the \u201cfall\u201d of the Western Roman Empire that the fog of racism really descended on Europe\u2019s backward, warring peoples. Charlemagne\u2019s attempt to restore a Frankish-Roman Western Roman Empire in Europe failed, leaving behind the warring feudal states of \u201cChristendom\u201d and the Roman Catholic Church acting as a weak substitute thereafter. The concept of Christendom was built, Robinson claims, on the older concept of the Barbarian \u201cother\u201d and directed it fearfully and resentfully at Islam.<\/p>\n
Islam clearly involved a rejection of Christ\u2019s divinity and was at best regarded as a dangerous heresy, at worst as a form of pagan \u201cdevil worship\u201d. Moreover the Muslim caliphates and sultanates were a serious military threat that overthrew Orthodox Christian rule in the Iberian peninsular and then the Balkans.<\/p>\n
All this excited fear and loathing from the Europeans but anti-Muslim racism \u2014 Islamophobia \u2014 can hardly be said to be the dominant, all-pervading ideology of Europe at the time. For the ruling class, internecine wars within and between medieval Christian kingdoms literally pitted brother against brother, mother against son, king against bishop, etc. For the peasantry, their enemy was the (often foreign, but European) feudal hierarchy and corrupt, land-owning Church.<\/p>\n
Between the eighth and 13th centuries the Islamic world developed on the basis of an agricultural revolution, richer in scientific knowledge and more technically accomplished than the European states at this time. It brought sugar, coffee and cotton crops, the spinning wheel, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy, arts, literature and music to the West. Positioned along the Silk Road, Islam also transmitted technologies, like gunpowder and paper, as well as lost texts from Greek and Roman antiquity, from East to West.<\/p>\n
Translations of Ancient Greek texts were made available once again through trade with the Islamic empire, and brought the writings of Aristotle into Europe. Robinson seizes upon the fact that during the crusades western Europeans came across black people of sub-Saharan origin, and as a result \u201cblackamoors\u201d were portrayed in frescoes of the last judgement as devils. But he then tries to link this to descriptions of the \u201cNegro\u201d, centuries later as \u201ca different sort of beast: dumb, animal labor, the benighted recipient of the benefits of slavery.\u201d The latter, he contends, has roots in the former and this proves the inherent racism of Europeans.<\/p>\n
In his search for the roots of European racism, Robinson next turns to the merchant capitalists, particularly around the Italian city-states, whose trade focused on wool, textiles and luxury items, but a large part being in slaves (mainly Slavs and other East Europeans, but also Black north Africans).<\/p>\n
Robinson treats medieval Islam as a fundamentally more humanitarian and less racialised tradition than Europe in the Middle Ages but this is simply not true. Yes, \u2014 as in the classical world, domestic and administrative slaves were treated more humanely, given more independence, more important roles and manumission was encouraged. In contrast plantation slavery, slavery in the mines was brutal as long as there was a readily available source of slaves. But these did not come primarily or mainly from Africa.<\/p>\n
But there were far more slaves across the Muslim empires than in Europe. Religious injunctions against enslaving Muslims led to a slave trade from both Europe and Africa. Some were worked to death on plantations with a low birth rate and therefore in need of replenishment, foreshadowing conditions in the American colonies, while many more were employed in handicraft industries or as soldiers.<\/p>\n
In Europe, however, the primary form of value extraction derived from peasant labour or serfdom, where the outsourcing of the costs of social reproduction to the peasant family, with its own small plot of land, was more economic. As a result slavery died out in Europe around 1000 CE, whereas it continued into the Ottoman Empire until its collapse 900 years later.<\/p>\n
In his attempt to deny European any role in developing the ideals of human liberation and at the same time to strike at a class analysis of what has led to the great advances that have marked human history Robinson downplays the European bourgeois revolutions. Claiming the bourgeoisie was neither unified, nor particularly fit to rule; the conditions for its global expansion just fell into its lap. Many bourgeoisies rose and fell historically with different actors and different methods of accumulating capital (merchant, manufacturing, venture, i.e. colonial capital, etc).<\/p>\n
According to Robinson\u2019s historiography, between the 17th and 19th centuries, a divided and warring Europe was rescued in part by its integration into the world market but remained essentially parochial, increasingly reliant on the feudal absolutist monarchies for its preservation and expansion, frequently engaged in internecine wars and both benefiting from and ideologically reinforcing a racialised view of the world.<\/p>\n
Nationalism \u2014 or national chauvinism, as Robinson often reduces it to \u2014 is portrayed as a trick to deceive the working class and peasantry but one that works in Europe because it builds on a tradition of racism, nourished by privileges for the dominant \u201crace\u201d.<\/p>\n
Robinson attacks Marx\u2019s historical materialism for heralding the European bourgeoisie\u2019s \u201cinevitable\u201d victory of over feudalism: \u201cThey were not the \u2018germ\u2019 of a new order diametrically posited in an increasingly hostile host, feudalism \u2014 but an opportunistic strata, wilfully adapted to the new conditions and possibility offered by the times.\u201d<\/p>\n
But what were these new conditions other than the development of capitalism itself, first in a mercantile, manufacturing, slave trading and colonising forms \u2014 before a massively transformational industrial revolution ensued? And who developed it if not the capitalist class \u2014 the bourgeoisie- in the various stages of its development. It is nonsensical to describe the class that accomplished this as simply \u201copportunistic\u201d. Through its economic power in its infancy it forced the absolute monarchies to centralise power, as Marx said, \u201cas a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism\u201d, just as, as it approached adulthood, it \u201cswept away all these relics of bygone times,\u201d such as the divine right of kings and bishops.<\/p>\n
The fact that different European and north American capitalist classes did this under the banner of anti-Catholic reformed religion (Holland and England), whilst a century later it adopted Enlightenment philosophy, culminating in the French revolution, where \u201cLibert\u00e9, Fraternit\u00e9, Egalit\u00e9\u201d was its battle-cry, is quite frankly incontestable. Marx and Engels also pointed out that these revolutionary explosions in consciousness and decisive action were preceded by decades, even centuries of fractious but often mutually beneficial relations with the absolutist state.<\/p>\n
This is one of Robinson\u2019s methodological problems; he sees the development of alliances \u2014 and consciousness \u2014 as linear and gradual, rather than by leaps and bounds, followed by slow, stagnant and even backward movement. As Marx noted in a letter to Engels \u201cin developments of such magnitude 20 years are no more than a day, though later on there may come days in which 20 years are embodied.\u201d This insight was based on historical materialism, which showed that the development of the forces of production, including human beings, who confront each other as classes, is able to take society forward until there is a clash between them that can only be resolved through a fundamental reorganisation of society and the relationship between the contending classes.<\/p>\n
Robinson rejects this, on the one hand claiming that classes and the class struggle are impersonal categories, which cannot explain real history made by real people, and on the other by supplanting historical materialism with a view of European history as a loop, with racism at its gravitational centre, drawing it frenetically into ever more extreme forms of racist violence.<\/p>\n
In fact Marx\u2019s materialism put human activity \u2014 \u201cpractical, human-sensuous activity\u201d \u2014 at the heart of his method. They may make history \u201cunder circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past\u201d but within those restrictions, they make choices. But those choices were not, indeed could not be, fully conscious of their meaning- certainly not for other classes or peoples that they were exploiting. Those choices largely coincide with their class interests. The development of colonial capitalism, plantation slavery and a racialised division of labour in the new world market was the \u201cchoice\u201d of the bourgeoisie but it was imposed in a bitter struggle against the plebeian layers, workers, artisans, etc.<\/p>\n
It was all part and parcel as we have seen of what Marx called the primitive (i.e. original) accumulation of capital and was accompanied in Britain by the expropriation of the peasantry by capitalist landlords, many of whom were also engaging in the slave trade and merchant ventures in the East Indies. It was not racist consciousness that drove them to this but rather the latter was a product or justification for what they were doing. And not all the social forces involved in this bourgeois revolution accepted this racism.<\/p>\n
Recent studies have revealed how the Levellers supported the abolition of slavery in the Putney debates and resisted being sent to colonise Ireland. Cromwell defeated them. The French Jacobins abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue and then in all its colonies. But when the popular forces, the sans culottes, were defeated and sent to the guillotine, Napoleon restored slavery (though he failed in Saint-Domingue\/Haiti). Later the Manchester cotton mill workers refused to handle cotton smuggled from the South during the civil war, because despite the hardship the \u201ccotton famine\u201d caused they demanded the abolition of slavery.<\/p>\n
By writing these events and countless other anti-racist struggles out of history, it is Robinson, not Marxism that is guilty of presenting an impersonal, monolithic view of history, where the outcome is preordained. For Marxists, it is the class struggle, where class is understood as a social relation between real people, not an impersonal category, that determines history.<\/p>\n
As early as the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels were clear, however, that capitalist development was not confined to Western Europe or North America but was spreading to all the other continents. Marx and Engels\u2019 voluminous research notes and writings on Turkey, India, Russia, China, etc. followed this development more than any contemporary economist or politician.<\/p>\n
But none of this is to diminish the fact that capitalism was infused with racism at its birth as a world system. The English merchant plantocracy financed Cromwell\u2019s army in the English Civil War and the American founding fathers were slave owners. The rights of man did not apply to 85 percent of the population, as Robinson points out, and Cromwell colonised Jamaica, whose plantations were the jewel in the crown of the early British Empire. The sharp contradiction of democratic rights of all against foreign or domestic tyrants, enshrined in the words of Rule Britannia (\u201cBritons never shall be slaves\u201d) had to be reconciled with the right to own other human beings as property, both necessary for the bourgeoisie to triumph and thrive. This could only be done with the rapid expansion and elevation of racism from the realm of theology and fear of the unknown to the pseudo-race science of eugenics and psychological \u201ctypes\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is true that capitalism, from the very birth of the world market, with the consumer commodities, first of tobacco, sugar, needed to introduce mass slavery from outside Europe. In the form of indentured labour they tried to use European unfree labour but this was soon eclipsed by the African slave trade. The production of cotton as an input into textile factory production created the final stage of chattel slavery in the USA. This in turn produced resistance and revolts by the slaves and the abolitionist movement in Europe and North America.<\/p>\n
It is also true that, as capitalism consolidated itself as a world system, and after its hypocritically congratulated itself for liberating the slaves, with colonialism and imperialism, in Africa and Asia, it racialised the world in order to justify its right to rule over less capitalistically developed countries, economically, politically, militarily, and profit from cheap labour in the semi-colonies and later though immigration to the mother countries. But is this what Robinson means by \u201cracial capitalism\u201d?<\/p>\n
Taking the term from South African communists, who used it to analyse apartheid capitalism in the 1920s, Robinson develops racial capitalism as a uniquely Western European development, which, because of the supposedly racist, aggressive character of its people over millennia, finally engulfed the world. The white working class too has these privileges, and even if not directly it benefits more from racism (at least in their minds) than it loses from capitalist exploitation. The Black people are therefore the only revolutionary subject, led by the most oppressed (though not necessarily workers) but eventually encompassing all classes.<\/p>\n
We have to reject this. Empirically it is clear that capitalism is an international system. While European and North American great powers still dominate the world, the rise of China is the biggest threat to US\/EU\/Nato dominance today. Likewise the global working class today is multiracial, with a non-white majority and joined together by working practices, trade and a common enemy.<\/p>\n
It is as Marx said a propertyless class in the sense that compared with the peasants and artisans and small traders who formed the majority of humanity in past ages, they do not own the means of production and exchange. By selling their labour power for only small proportion of what their labour produces for the capitalist, what Marx called surplus value, realised through its sale as profit, they are an exploited and an oppressed class and they are now an absolute majority of humanity.<\/p>\n
But class oppression is far from the only form of oppression, although it is the deep root of these other forms. These include people of colour subject to racism, women subjected to misogyny and sexism, nationalities denied their own independent states, people persecuted discriminated against on the basis of religion, gender identity, disabilities and other factors.<\/p>\n
These inequalities exist within the working class based on these oppressions and are used by the capitalist class to divide and weaken the unity of the working class in its struggle against exploitation. The most enlightened and militant sections of the working class, whose viewpoint Marxism embodies, have thus always seen it as essential that the working class includes in its class straggle the fight against all forms of oppression and that socialism, communism, i.e. a classless an stateless society, will at last end all traces of these; including of course racism.<\/p>\n
For this reason, as well as its numbers and worldwide character, the working class is a universal class that by emancipating itself emancipates the whole of humanity. Black people\u2019s struggle alone cannot do that both because they are divided into classes with opposing interests and because they cannot destroy racial capitalism in its heartlands without becoming part of a \u2018multiracial\u2019, internationalist working class struggle. Robinson\u2019s theory of racial capitalism tends rather to soften the class struggle between Black workers and Black rulers, while denigrating attempts at class unity.<\/p>\n
According to Robinson Marx was wrong to suggest that national differences would dissipate under the universal conditions of wage labour under capitalism, because it was built into \u201cracial capitalism\u201d and reproduced unwittingly by the European radical tradition:<\/p>\n
Racialism and its permutations persisted, rooted not in a particular era but in the civilisation itself […] the effects of racialism were bound to appear in the social expression of every strata of every European society no matter the structures on which they were formed.<\/p>\n
Robinson \u2014 like many other writers \u2014 argues that \u201cNationalism defeated socialism.\u201d He claims that Marx and Engels were simply German nationalists themselves for urging workers to support Austria against the French in the Italian War of 1859. Lenin and Trotsky were \u201c\u2018intellectual opportunists\u201d for signing the treaty with the Germans at Brest-Litvosk. The Comintern exported Russian nationalism by demanding defence of the USSR above all else. \u201cCommunist\u201d regimes from Angola to Cuba to China all took on national characteristics. He sums up his critique in this way:<\/p>\n
„What the Marxists did not understand about the political and ideological phenomenon of nationalism is that it was not (and is not) a historical aberration (of proletarian internationalism). Nor is it necessarily the contrary: a developmental stage of internationalism. Nationalism defeated the Marxism of the Second International (World War I), but ironically, was a basis of the Marxism of the Third International (the Russian revolutions; Stalin\u2019s socialism in one country; the conditions for membership in the Comintern), yet its primary world-historical significance was denied.“<\/p>\n
Of course some of the targets of his criticism are justified. Some leaders in the Second International (e.g. the British Fabians) supported the \u201ccivilising mission\u201d of colonial rule, some US Socialists opposed the \u201cperil\u201d of Chinese immigration and nearly all sections its defended the \u201cFatherland\u201d in August 1914. The degenerate Comintern under Stalin increasingly abandoned world revolution and determined policy on the basis of the priorities of the USSR. But these criticisms and exposures did not wait for him to make. They were made long ago by the very Marxist figures he traduces. Other criticisms are misdirected and Robinson\u2019s conclusions are thus false.<\/p>\n
His major methodological failing is to treat the national question each time outside of its historical context. Nationalism in Europe is bad because it is European. Black nationalism is good because it is African (and or from that continent\u2019s diaspora. Marx considered the national revolutions historically progressive because, whatever their crimes against humanity, which the founders of scientific socialism were among the first to expose, they were fundamentally for sovereignty, democracy and large national economies within a world system.<\/p>\n
But the creation of first national and then a world economy world and the working class, opened the road to fully human history and freedom. Thus Marx and Engels supported German national unity from the 1830s through to 1870, particularly if it was created by a revolution from below. Because they thought France under Napoleon III in 1859, was intervening in Italy as a pretext for seizing the Rhineland and this impeding German unification it was the immediate foe. But his immediate object was to encourage revolutionary forces, including petty bourgeois nationalist forces to combat Prussia as well as France. But in no sense was Marx such a German nationalist himself:<\/p>\n
„The relationship of the revolutionary workers\u2019 party to the petit-bourgeois democrats [nationalists] is this: it co-operates with them against the party they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position.“<\/p>\n
He continues:<\/p>\n
„While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible [it is] our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far \u2014 not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world \u2014 that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.“<\/p>\n
Marx never succumbed even to the limited progressive nationalism of the democrats because he had seen how they betrayed their own revolution in 1848. He insisted that the workers needed their own independent party and political and economic goals. Marx and Engels did not tail the nationalists but used the united front tactic to expose how shallow their commitment was to radical democracy and workers\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n
Historical context is also needed when it comes to another instance Robinson cites of Marx and Engels nationalism, their comments on the \u201cnon-historic\u201d peoples, \u201cremnants of nations\u201d during the 1848\u201351 revolutions which swept Europe. In the nineteenth century it contained many different languages and communities, many of which have now virtually disappeared, absorbed into the larger states. If all of them had attained statehood, with national borders and tariffs, then the productive forces, including the working class, would have been stunted from birth.<\/p>\n
The process of assimilation, providing it could be accomplished without discrimination and oppression, was in itself progressive. Marx and Engels saw the larger peoples who were still divided (Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary) as progressive in their fight for unity and independence. Because in the course of the 1848 revolution the rulers of Austria and Russia used some of the smaller peoples (the Croats and the Czechs) against the Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries, Engels used the term non-historic or doomed peoples, to describe them. However this was an incorrect distinction, one he and Marx never applied to another small nation, the Irish, where both recognised that English prejudices against the Irish were reactionary and which they sought to combat during the period of the First International (1864\u20131874). It was a term he later dropped and one that Marxists like Karl Kautsky and Roman Rosdolsky criticised.<\/p>\n
However it is true that not all the demands national movements are progressive in their given historical context, especially if their demands entail the oppression of another people (e.g. Israel-Palestine). But in none of these cases were Marx and Engels motivated by \u201cGerman nationalism\u201d. Indeed when a newly unified German Empire seized the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine they condemned it and predicted this as the future seed of a pan-European war.<\/p>\n
The distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations was taken up and developed by Lenin to deal with the national question in the epoch of imperialism. Unfortunately Robinson dismisses \u201cthe complex and rather voluminous character of [Lenin\u2019s] writings on the national question\u201d and turns (conveniently) to Stalin to provide \u201cthe most simple and authoritative proclamations on the national question.\u201d However, Lenin\u2019s writings on the subject (neither particularly \u201ccomplex\u201d nor especially \u201cvoluminous\u201d) deal with questions of assimilation and national self-determination in detail and centre on the right of small nations to secede. In addition they are of a piece with Marx and Engels\u2019 support for the Irish and Indian struggles against Britain.<\/p>\n
Lenin defined imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, when a handful of robber nations, \u201cGreat Powers\u201d, have divided up the less developed parts of the world between them and finance capital and great monopolies dominate the economy. At this point there are \u201ctwo historical tendencies\u2026 first the awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against all national oppression, and the creation of nation states [and second] the breakdown of national barriers, the creation of international unity of capital, of economic life in general\u201d. From this Lenin concludes two principles: \u201cthe equality of nations and languages and the impermissibility of all privileges [and second] the principle of internationalism\u201d alongside the struggle against \u201cbourgeois nationalism, even of the most refined [i.e. oppressed] kind.\u201d<\/p>\n
In short Marxism provided the programmatic basis for fighting oppressive European states with oppressed national minorities and for independence struggles in the colonies. Bolshevism supported the oppressed poles and \u2018races\u2019 not just in words but also as the agency of their own liberation, and the Third International began the task of building revolutionary parties in the colonies whilst the CPs in the imperialist countries fought imperialism from within. Later in the 1930s Trotsky, in correspondence with his South African co-thinkers, heavily stressed the fact of racial and national oppression exercised by the whites; \u201cThe South African possessions of Great Britain form a dominion only from the point of view of the white minority. From the point of the black majority, South Africa is a slave colony\u201d.<\/p>\n
The revolution in South Africa is, Trotsky says, \u201cunthinkable without the awakening of the native masses\u201d without them gaining \u201cconfidence in their strength, a heightened personal consciousness, a cultural growth.\u201d Trotsky concludes; \u201cUnder these conditions, the South African republic will emerge first of all as a \u2018black republic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Lenin and Trotsky played an important role, partially acknowledged by Robinson, in ensuring the CPUSA and the Commenter took the Black struggle in the USA seriously. As a counter-balance to the US comrades and the tradition of the American Socialist Party (Eugene Debs infamously remarked \u201cWe have nothing special to offer the Negro\u201d), they invited Claude McKay to the Fourth Congress.<\/p>\n
This Congress adopted the Theses on the Black Question, which recognised that the \u201chistory of Blacks in the United States has prepared them to play an important role in the liberation struggle of the entire African race\u201d. Slaves were \u201cnot docile\u201d, as the struggles against slavery proved, but in the aftermath of World War I it was the disillusioned demobbed soldiers and the Black workers in the industrial North who were \u201cin the vanguard of the struggle for black liberation\u201d.<\/p>\n
It concluded by calling on Communists to:<\/p>\n
„support all forms of the black movement […] [fighting for] equal wages and equal social and political rights […] to force the trade unions to admit black workers [or, if unsuccessful, to] organize blacks into their own unions and then make special use of the united front tactic to force the general union to admit them.“<\/p>\n
Robinson gets himself tangled up when he suggests Marxists should have considered Black Americans a nationality, not a nation; therefore calling for a separate nation in the Southern Black Belt was \u201cpolitical opportunism searching for theoretical justifications.\u201d Here we cannot go into the issue of whether a state for black people in the USA was possible or desirable in the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly Jim Crow in the former states of the Confederacy was a brutal racial oppression. And the fight against it was one that revolutionaries, black and white, should have thrown themselves into and many did. But the large numbers of black workers who had moved to the northern cities (attracted by jobs and driven to escape the violence of the white supremacists) meant that a contiguous Black Republic could not in all likelihood have solved the question of racial oppression. Nor could the Back to Africa movement of Marcus Garvey.<\/p>\n
With reference to the Black Belt state thesis, Trotsky provides the most nuanced guide. \u201cAn abstract criterion is not decisive in this question,\u201d he warns, \u201cbut much more decisive is the historical consciousness, their feelings and their impulses.\u201d That is, one cannot decide this question except through struggle for equal democratic and social rights, amongst which is the right to self-determination and secession. Anticipating Robinson\u2019s (and Richard Wright\u2019s) objections that the Communist Party is using Black Americans for their own agenda, he says:<\/p>\n
„As a party we can remain absolutely neutral on this [whether Blacks should form a separate nation]. We cannot say it will be reactionary. It is not reactionary. We cannot tell them to set up a state because that will weaken imperialism and so will be good for us, the white workers. That would be against internationalism itself. We cannot say to them, \u2018Stay here, even at the price of [Black people\u2019s] economic progress\u2019. We can say, \u2018It is for you to decide. If you wish to take a part of the country, it is all right, but we do not wish to make the decision for you.“<\/p>\n
The one social phenomenon Trotsky insisted there could be no concessions to white workers\u2019 racism, which he condemned in the clearest terms, denouncing them as \u201cbeasts\u201d and \u201cindescribably reactionary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately Robinson refuses to engage with Trotsky\u2019s theory of permanent revolution. Like a vulgar pragmatist he simply dismisses it because Stalinism created facts on the ground:<\/p>\n
„Trotsky had been committed to the end to winning the debate with Stalin over the permanent revolution versus socialism in one country. While the Stalinists were practical and went about seizing and then preserving their power (and, incidentally, state property), Trotsky continued to defend himself in the most fixed terms: contending with his ghosts over who was closer to Lenin.“<\/p>\n
This shows contempt not just for Trotsky, but also for the intelligence of the reader. Trotsky was not shy in analysing of why Stalin was able to \u201cseize state property\u201d \u2014 it was because the Russian revolution was isolated and failed to draw the more advanced Western European workers in its revolutionary wake. In an analysis that he confined first to Russia but later generalised, he wrote:<\/p>\n
„With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses […] The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution….<\/p>\n
The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable […] The socialist revolution begins on the national arena; it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completion, only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.“<\/p>\n
Robinson is completely wrong to caste Stalin as the practitioner and Trotsky as the theorist. It was Trotsky who organised the insurrection in 1917 and who built from scratch the Red Army that won the civil war, actions which allowed the revolution to survive. Stalin was against the seizure of power in October. His bureaucratic regime was only \u201csuccessful\u201d because a) Lenin and Trotsky had made and defended the revolution, and b) the failure to internationalise the revolution led to the growth of a bureaucratic caste which took over the Communist Party and established a totalitarian dictatorship. Trotsky\u2019s defeat was the defeat of the revolutionary proletariat. But despite this \u201cpractical\u201d defeat, Trotsky\u2019s \u201ctheory\u201d was proved correct positively because the Bolsheviks to seize power in a socialist revolution, and negatively by the failure to spread the revolution globally. Stalin\u2019s \u201csuccess\u201d was in blocking off the road to socialism \u2014 via a bureaucratic dictatorship over the working class.<\/p>\n
Trotsky\u2019s elaboration of Marxism solved a problem that had been gripping Marxists for 50 years. If capitalism was drawing every corner of the globe, including pre- and non-capitalist countries, into its orbit via world trade and war, engendering class struggle by proletarians and the peasantry against imperialism and domestic capital, do they have to first transition to capitalism before they can strive for socialism?<\/p>\n
The answer to this question obviously has huge implications for the struggles in Africa and for the diaspora. Stalin\u2019s theory dogmatically states that it is impossible to \u201cleap over stages\u201d of development and therefore the working class should follow the bourgeoisie, who should lead. This has led not only to countless missed opportunities over the past 90 years, but also to outright massacring of the revolutionary forces. It limited the Black Belt strategy to a \u201cdemocratic\u201d stage, rather than a fight for Black working class power. In Africa, Asia and South America, it counselled liberation movements to postpone socialist tasks and hand power to the bourgeoisie.<\/p>\n
Nor was Trotsky the one out of step with classical Marxist thinking, as the Stalinists and Robinson claim. Towards the end of his life, Marx prefaced the Russian edition of Capital by asking whether the obshchina, \u201ca form of primeval common ownership\u201d would have to be dissolved into private property by the coming bourgeois revolution or could they \u201cpass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership\u201d. His answer was clear: \u201cIf the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian form of common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his search for a Black radical tradition, Robinson necessarily starts with Africa. He spends surprisingly little time, however, discussing African civilisation before the arrival of European slave traders and colonisers. He mentions the trading ports along the east coast but not much about the feudal cities, like Timbukto and Benin, or the kingdoms, like Kongo and Greater Zimbabwe, further inland or the great kings, like Mansa Musa of Mali.<\/p>\n
Robinson alludes to \u201can intricate system of class and family distinctions\u201d in the dwellings and places of worship in these civilisations but says no more. In fact class society had emerged in Africa a thousand years before Europeans arrived. Successful groups had expanded their territory, displacing or absorbing other peoples, and were divided into various classes, creating divisions of labour and gathering wealth and power for dynastic kings and emperors, probably on a par with Europe up until the development of capitalism.<\/p>\n
However, this is not Robinson\u2019s concern. Europe\u2019s interruption of African development not only wiped out those specific histories but replaced them with a unitary history and historic mission in dialectical opposition to Europe: \u201cBlack radicalism is a negation of Western civilisation [because it] owes its peculiar moment to the historical interdiction of African life by European agents […] its genesis\u201d. Walter Rodney\u2019s observation of \u201cthe essential oneness of African culture\u201d is due to the tribal, specific origins of the slave being obliterated:<\/p>\n
„The \u2018Negro\u2019, that is the colour black, was both a negation of African and a unity of opposition to white. The construct of Negro, unlike the term \u2018African\u2019, \u2018Moor\u2019, or \u2018Ethiope\u2019 suggested no situatedness in time, that is history […] The Negro had no civilization, no cultures, no religions, no history, no place and finally no humanity […] The \u2018Negro\u2019 was a wholly distinct ideological construct from those images of Africans that had preceded it.“<\/p>\n
This powerful passage exposes the dehumanising factor in modern anti-Black racism. It is also a tacit recognition that modern racism, i.e. from the 17th Century onwards, was \u201cdistinct\u201d from any form of racialism \u201cthat had preceded it\u201d. It was a construct formed to justify the constant forced exodus over a period of nearly 400 years of 15\u201350 million Africans to the New World, a considerable number dying en route. Fresh captives, made necessary by the low birth rate, the high sickness and mortality rates, the torture and beatings, but mainly the overworking of the slaves, kept alive the feelings of degradation and dehumanisation for those already on the plantations.<\/p>\n
Robinson does not deny that Marx showed that slavery was central to the process of primitive accumulation of capital and that the development of European capitalism into a world system could not have occurred without the value it created. As Marx said as early as 1847:<\/p>\n
„Direct slavery is just as much a pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gives the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. This slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.“<\/p>\n
But it is not true that Marx overlooked plantation slavery beyond this role. He recognised that this modern form of mass slavery marked a \u201csecond type of colonialism\u201d, distinct from the first kind, which involved mainly subsistence farming and handicraft, local trade and free labour, i.e. simple reproduction. The second type was based on plantations financed by capital and producing for the world market using slave labour, which itself created new needs and greater means of production, i.e. expanded reproduction.<\/p>\n
This poses two theoretical questions: how can the world market absorb products where labour power is not directly paid for by the capitalist; and what is the actual relation of the slave to her\/his capitalist master? Marx answered the first question quite simply:<\/p>\n
„slavery is possible at individual points within the bourgeois system of production […] only because it does not exist at other points; and appears as an anomaly […] The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour.“<\/p>\n
Therefore it was necessary for the world working class to fight to abolish slavery or face the future degradation of their own position.<\/p>\n
Marx did not dismiss the difference between free labour and slavery but analysed it. He started by analysing the production of surplus value: \u201cThe price that is paid for the slave is no more than the anticipated and capitalised surplus-value or profit that is to be wrung out of the slave.\u201d While the free worker has no value, i.e. s\/he cannot be bought and sold as a commodity, only their labour power for a certain duration at a certain price, the slave has a value or exchange-value, based on a future stream of profit and can therefore be traded, rented out or even used as security against loans, i.e. fictitious capital.<\/p>\n
The effect this had on the conditions and use of the slave was immense. It quickly became clear to planters that it was more profitable to use up the value of the slave through arduous overwork, 12 hours in the field and another six processing the cotton, etc. so that their working life was as short as seven years, rather than 20 or 30. \u201cWhat can be thought of a town [in Virginia] which holds a public meeting to petition that the period of labour for men [slaves] shall be diminished to 18 hours?\u201d Marx asked ironically.<\/p>\n
Similar considerations encouraged the capitalists to reduce the costs of reproduction in terms of food, housing, periods of replenishment. That this persisted even after the abolition of the slave trade proves how resistant to change the whole system was.<\/p>\n
This \u201crelation of domination\u201d, as Marx called it, could \u201cnever create general industriousness\u201d but on the contrary a permanent state of rebellion on behalf of the slaves, making them particularly reluctant to improve their productivity, since this always enriched their tormenters, never themselves. Not only did this make slavery quite unsuitable to factory production, because capital was invested in slaves rather than machinery, it also kept the slaves in a perpetual condition of a \u201cbeast of burden\u201d like a \u201cdumb animal\u201d. The overworking of the slaves, the resistance to modernisation and the degrading of the land through monoculture all pointed to the crisis of the system in the 19th century, which could only be solved, from the planters\u2019 point of view, by the acquisition of new lands and more slaves.<\/p>\n
Despite its longevity, therefore, capitalist plantation slavery was a system wracked by crisis, which could only develop in contradiction to the system, industrial capitalism, that it fed. Moreover, unlike industrial capitalism, slavery was inimical to the raising of productivity or revolutionising the means of production, not least because of the heroic and persistent revolt of the slaves. Marx was a staunch abolitionist, both in theory and in practice. In the conflict between capitalist plantation slavery and industrial capitalism, he advocated full-blooded support for the latter.<\/p>\n
Robinson covers slave rebellions comprehensibly and across the Americas, including the Caribbean. Not surprisingly African slaves considered plantations as \u201cunnatural\u201d and runaways would revert to more traditional African agricultural methods, even \u201cretained and developed concepts of family and kin […] of land tenure that was in contradiction to the dominant European culture [and wanted] to be free to develop their own culture […] These were the basic aspirations, which varied according to different conditions in each of the colonies affected [by rebellion].\u201d<\/p>\n
This is entirely as one might expect. Slaves would have no other recourse but to build maroon or palenque settlements and federations based on small-scale agriculture and marauding, i.e. stealing onto plantations to take food, implements, including weapons, and more Black slaves to join them. Given they were highly militarised societies on account of the constant threat of invasion and recapture, centralisation (e.g. Kingship) and religion played inevitably important roles.<\/p>\n
The first recorded uprising took place in 1537 in New Spain. Once armed, from the 1560s onwards, runaways formed mocambos, palenques, quilombos, maroon towns. The longest lasting and most famous was the Quilombo dos Palmares in Brazil, which resisted capture from 1605 to 1695. It consisted of two towns of 5\u20136,000 inhabitants each and numerous villages, ranging in size from 11,000 to 30,000 at its height comprising of escaped slaves and a smaller number of mixed-race, indigenous and poor white inhabitants, including fugitive Portuguese soldiers.<\/p>\n
The Palmares were ruled by a king, Ganga-Zumba, who first fought the Dutch, then sided with them against the Portuguese. After the Dutch were driven out, the Portuguese intensified attacks until 1678, when Ganga-Zumba signed a peace treaty, promising to return African-born slaves to their masters and relocating closer to Portuguese property. The colonialists reneged on the deal, provoking a coup during which Ganga-Zumba\u2019s captain (and possibly nephew) Zumbi poisoned the king and continued the war as the new monarch until 1694, when he was captured and killed.<\/p>\n
Other slave revolts followed a similar pattern, though on a shorter and smaller scale. Robinson highlights the role of maroon armies, recruited by the Spanish to fight the British in Jamaica in 1655\u201360 (and the \u201cgreat traitor\u201d Juan de Bola, who swapped sides and wiped out the other maroons), the raids of \u201cKing Benkos\u201d in Colombia in the 1610s and the \u201cBush Negros\u201d of Suriname. What they reveal is that the slave plantations in all territories faced constant revolts and armed conflict with palenques, quilombos and maroon settlements.<\/p>\n
While this is an important legacy of struggle that for many decades was deliberately underestimated or ignored, Robinson accentuates certain aspects of their character, namely their adoption of African customs and beliefs, to the detriment of others, which contradict this. But to understand the nature of the slave revolts, it is important to analyse the full picture.<\/p>\n
Firstly the quilombos were far more multi-racial than Robinson acknowledges; Palmares\u2019 inhabitants included \u201ccrioulos, mulattoes, Indians, and even some renegade whites, or mesti\u00e7os, as well as Africans\u201d. Although African traditions were predominant, the quilombos would develop religions and languages that were a mixture of European, Indian and African sources.<\/p>\n
In most there were clear class divisions, with \u201csubordinate chiefs in outlying settlements\u201d, while \u201cthose taken in raids were enslaved\u201d. However, the quilombo do Mola famously was a republic with democratic voting, led by two women, Felipa Maria Aranha and Maria Luiza Piri\u00e1. In another fugitive settlement the maroons allowed one magistrate to live there so that he could administer the Spanish Civil Code to help them keep order.<\/p>\n
Likewise racial solidarity seemed to be very low on their list of priorities. Some fugitives focused their attacks mainly on freed African farmers, while being prepared to attack other quilombos in the service of the colonialists and offer recent fugitives or captives to the slavers in return for peace, or trading with Indian and white villages to obtain what they could not grow or make.<\/p>\n
But if racial solidarity was low on display, inter-racial class solidarity was very visible in the English colonies in the second half of the 17th Century. Indentured English and Irish \u201cservants\u201d began to arrive in the colonies from 1627 onwards, reaching a crescendo of 2,000 per year in the 1640s and 3,000 per year in the 1650s. While Christian (i.e. white) servants could typically earn manumission after four or five years and Indians after 10, they were set to work in the fields alongside Africans and endured beatings, malnourishment and captivity with them too. The fact that they were \u201csometimes sold according to their weight\u201d indicates that their capitalist buyers regarded them primarily as chattel.<\/p>\n
Here radicalisation was brought mainly from Europe: exiles from the Levellers and Diggers after their defeat at the hands of Cromwell in the English Civil War and from Ireland after England\u2019s conquest of the island. The New Model Army had debated slavery in 1647 and called for its abolition: \u201cYe may be free if ye will, be free now or never, this is the seventh year of the jubilee.\u201d<\/p>\n
Undoubtedly this referred as much to indentured labour and the apprentice system, which continued well into the 19th Century, where the children of paupers would be sold to industrialists and bound over typically to the age of 21 or 24 for boys, at least as it did to African slaves. In some cases lots were drawn to decide which children would be taken and families fined \u00a310 for refusing to hand them over.<\/p>\n
For European radicals the similarities between the servant or apprentice and chattel slave were far greater than their differences; many apprentices were not paid for their labour power. Moreover this great dispossession of the commons and the impoverishment, enslavement of children and eviction of the peasantry that followed was just as crucial an element of the primitive accumulation of capital necessary for the industrial revolution as the triangular slave trade. Robinson\u2019s one-sided account, focusing solely on African slavery, is not accurate.<\/p>\n
Two serious multiracial uprisings \u2014 in Barbados in 1649 and in Virginia in 1676 \u2014united these forces in their thousands, threatening the colonies\u2019 survival. Nathaniel Bacon led the latter revolt \u201chaving first proclaimed liberty to all servants and Negroes\u201d. These two rebellions frightened the planters and authorities so much that they immediately put in place new codes for servants and slaves, granting the former freedom from routine corporal punishment, regularising the length of service before their freedom and giving them \u201cskilled supervisory and policing positions\u201d, while condemning Blacks to perpetual slavery \u2014 even if they converted to Christianity. These codes were generalised to cover all the English colonies between 1661 and 1705.<\/p>\n
Inter-racial marriage was banned and the doors opened for pseudo-biological theories of race to proliferate, in which \u201cEuropeans do not only differ from the […] Africans in colour […] but also […] in natural manners and the internal workings of their minds.\u201d White supremacy was promoted as a direct response to the multi-racial rebellions of the 17th Century from Brazil and the Spanish colonies to the Caribbean and American colonies. Racism was used first to justify the enslavement of Africans, second to prevent white labour from joining forces with Black labour.<\/p>\n
But the Haitian revolution changed everything. Here a slave rebellion achieved state power. Their leader Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture could read and had access to a library and military doctrine, was trusted to carry out fairly important transactions for his master and through his dealings with French merchants and familiarity with their newspapers learned about the unfolding drama of the French revolution and the machinations of rival colonial powers. This was no doomed rebellion. The question was, could the Black Jacobins seize, then retain state power?<\/p>\n
For all his diplomatic skills and military prowess, Toussaint could not escape the conclusion that the only way to defend the revolution against French, Spanish, English and American colonial powers was to retain the plantations, preferably with the white managers and owners, and therefore in some form or another a disciplined workforce, i.e. wage slavery or peasant serfdom.<\/p>\n
Toussaint was a bourgeois revolutionary, inspired by the French revolution. What James\u2019 Black Jacobins brilliantly shows is that this great bourgeois revolution, led by slaves, mulattoes and freed persons, had just as many twists and turns, great leaders and political strategies as the French or any other bourgeois revolution.<\/p>\n
For this reason, Toussaint remains a problematic figure: a leader of slaves, yet himself an owner of slaves; a fearless critic and opponent of European colonialism, yet committed to joining the French republic and continuing the plantation system; a brilliant military leader, yet one who gave himself up without a struggle to the French authorities, to die in a Paris jail.<\/p>\n
Robinson takes aim at James, when, referring to Toussaint\u2019s surrender and Dessaline\u2019s continuation of the struggle to its victory, he writes \u201cIf Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilisation were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further. Toussaint\u2019s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Analysing this passage, Robinson claims that James was wrong to suggest breaking with the French republic was \u201ca limit beyond which he could not go\u201d and this was down to his \u201csubmission to \u2018scientific socialism\u2019 by denying the material force of ideology\u201d. In order to break through this limit, \u201cthe revolutionary masses must preserve to themselves the direction of the revolutionary movement, never deferring to professional revolutionists, parties, or the intelligentsia.<\/p>\n
This is grossly unfair to James. He did put forward \u201can alternative course\u201d \u2014 essentially a version of permanent revolution. Toussaint should have \u201crigidly excluded the bourgeoisie from political power\u201d, while retaining their expertise in running plantations and in military officer roles for a period during which the black masses could learn how to run society without them. If this had been necessary in Russia, with the New Economic Policy, \u201cthe black Jacobins, relatively speaking, were far worse off culturally than the Russian Bolsheviks\u201d. Yet the Haitian revolution met the same roadblock as the Russians \u2014 \u201cthe defeat of the revolution in Europe. Had the [French] Jacobins been able to consolidate the democratic republic in 1794, Haiti would have remained a French colony, but any attempt to restore slavery would have been most unlikely\u201d.<\/p>\n
There is an element of fantasy about James\u2019 scenario, it is true, but the fact that the Haitian revolution was bound up in the fate of the French revolution is undeniable. Robinson\u2019s appeal to vague anti-slavery ideology, on the other hand, is pure fantasy: why was the Haitian revolution able to abolish slavery when no other slave rebellion got anywhere near doing so? Or was the army expected to follow their leaders thus far, then cast them aside, all at once, and defeat the French on their own? It is remarkable that Robinson, in order to defend his interpretation of the Black radical tradition, should dismiss every single Black leader \u2014 Toussaint, Dessalines, Mo\u00efse, Christophe \u2014 involved in its success as deficient.<\/p>\n
This mightiest of all the slave revolts had enormous implications for colonial rule. From this point all future slave movements aimed at abolition. Samuel Sharpe called for a peaceful protest on Christmas Day 1831, refusing to work until they were paid \u201chalf the going rate.\u201d Their demand was to become proletarians; their preferred method of struggle was a form of strike.<\/p>\n
But no less important was the political abolitionist movement, which though led in parliaments by the liberal bourgeoisie was proletarian at its base, and in which Marx participated enthusiastically. Robinson barely mentions this movement, even though Black activists and intellectuals, like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, were central figures, presumably because it contradicts his thesis that Black liberation can only come from purely Black activity.<\/p>\n
The mounting pressure, coupled with the declining stability, profitability and importance of the plantations, persuaded the British to move towards ending the slave trade sooner, which in turn intensified the crisis in the international system, leading inevitably to the US Civil War, which Marx predicted. However, his contribution and the full history of the Civil War lay buried for 70 years, as it was turned into a white American endeavour with no Black agency at all.<\/p>\n
In this context Du Bois\u2019 masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America played a huge role in restoring historical facts about the Southern slaves\u2019 active and at times decisive role in the civil war, first in deserting the Southern plantations, then in forcing the Union to give them work and to join the army and finally in radicalising the Republican state governments in the Reconstruction era.<\/p>\n
Du Bois was clearly influenced by Marx and attempted to apply a materialist class analysis to the period, calling the mass escape from the South a \u201cgeneral strike\u201d and the regime in South Carolina as a sort of \u201cdictatorship of the Black proletariat\u201d. Between 1868 and 1877, \u201camong Negroes, and particularly in the South, there was being put into force one of the most extraordinary experiments in Marxism [\u2026] backed by the military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor.\u201d Meanwhile the white worker was hostile, \u201cnot willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent labouring class\u201d, aspired to property or at least a labour aristocracy and participated in the \u201csubordination of colored labor [\u2026] which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is this despair at class unity at the moment of advance that Robinson latches onto to portray Du Bois as a Black radical, who attempts a Marxist analysis, only to find it wanting and instead discovers that race trumps class in the end. In offering this critique, Robinson contends, Du Bois was offering, perhaps unwittingly, \u201cboth a critique of the ideologies of American socialist movements and a revision of Marx\u2019s theory of revolution and class struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Du Bois\u2019 \u201crevision\u201d of Marxism was to lump the industrial proletariat, peasants, small farmers, soldiers and slaves into one big labouring class. This downplays the importance of the Black slaves\u2019 self-emancipation. If this wasn\u2019t strictly speaking a \u201cgeneral strike\u201d, it was, as Marx would call it, a \u201cslave revolution\u201d. Likewise the radical democracy based on universal (male) suffrage in the reconstruction era may not have been the \u201cdictatorship of labor\u201d but it did represent the high tide of the revolutionary movement, where the petit- bourgeoisie and labouring classes dominated legislatures in the guise of a transformed Republican Party and pushed through a series of egalitarian reforms.<\/p>\n
These are minor blemishes, it must not be forgotten. Coming in defence of Du Bois\u2019 work against Stalinist deprecations, CLR James wrote:<\/p>\n
„Far from doing harm, the conception that lay behind the mistaken formula was the strength of Du Bois\u2019 book: he recognized that the Negroes in particular had tried to carry out ideas that went beyond the prevailing conceptions of bourgeois democracy. Precisely this was aimed at the heart of the whole Stalinist popular front conception. Hence their hostility to Du Bois.“<\/p>\n
Again Robinson turns a conflict with degenerate Stalinism into a conflict with revolutionary Marxism.<\/p>\n
Moreover Black Reconstruction followed a close study of Marx\u2019s writings on the civil war, in which he was not shy of occasional rhetorical flourishes himself. In January 1865 on behalf of the First International, Marx drafted a letter to Lincoln, which concluded: \u201cThe workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American anti-slavery war will do for the working classes.\u201d But by September, Marx felt the need to issue a stark warning to the American workers in another open letter:<\/p>\n
„As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease. Let your citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve. If you fail to give them citizens\u2019 rights, while you demand citizens\u2019 duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people\u2019s blood.<\/p>\n
The eyes of Europe and of the world are fixed upon your efforts at re-construction, and enemies are ever ready to sound the knell of the downfall of republican institutions when the slightest chance is given. We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom\u2019s limb, and your victory will be complete.“<\/p>\n
Du Bois\u2019 history of reconstruction bears out the correctness of Marx\u2019s stark warning on its eve. A strange \u201crevision of Marx\u2019s theory of revolution and class struggle\u201d that concurs with Marx\u2019s own strategic vision that working class power in America cannot be achieved without Black liberation: this is no economistic view of class.<\/p>\n
While Robinson urges Black writers and activists to break from the Marxist theory of historical materialism and class analysis, he does not replace it with any theory of his own, Rather he claims theory itself is a product of Western epistemology and puts forward a project based on rejecting all theoretical thinking.<\/p>\n
He starts by turning to James\u2019 Notes on Dialectics (1948), in which he argues that Stalinism is the form of the revolutionary proletariat, in which all the class conscious workers are to be found. In this situation, James argues:<\/p>\n
„There is nothing more to organize. You can organize workers as workers [trade unionism]. You can create a special organization of revolutionary workers [Stalinism]. But once you have those two you have reached an end. Organization as we have known it is at an end. The task is to abolish organization. The task today is to call for, to teach, to illustrate, to develop spontaneity-the free creative activity of the proletariat.“<\/p>\n
But the idea that conscious political organisation has somehow reached its limits with Stalinism and trade unionism is itself absurdly non-dialectical. Why did the Bolsheviks forge new organisations in opposition to the Second International after 1914? Secondly James\u2019 arguments on organisation are neither new nor insights brought to European tradition from outside, a Black perspective. They are a hallmark of another 19th Century European tradition, anarchism. However, organisation is an essential part of social life, social being. It is never \u201cat an end\u201d because life, events tear it apart and it has to be rebuilt and strengthened. By \u201cdeveloping spontaneity\u201d, one develops consciousness; organisation based on \u201cdeveloping consciousness\u201d is conscious organisation.<\/p>\n
Robinson leaves James there because he never fully broke with Marxism and turns to his final subject American novelist Richard Wright, a committed CPUSA activist from 1934 to 1942, who came from a poor, rural proletarian background. For Robinson the novel is raised higher than theory because they are \u201cmuch more authentic documents than the conventional forms of history [because they] weav[e] living consciousness into the impress of social theory and ideology.\u201d He is the only one of Robinson\u2019s trilogy who actually broke from Marxism.<\/p>\n
For Wright, Marxism\u2019s weakness was that it \u201cimplied that it was a peculiar privilege of the revolutionary intellectual to comprehend this deeper extra-existential order\u201d, i.e. the class struggle. The Black writer had a duty to give voice to the Black worker\u2019s \u201cdeep, informed, and complex consciousness\u201d and \u201ccreate myths and symbols that inspire a faith in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Native Son Bigger Thomas\u2019 \u201clack of class consciousness\u201d is seen as a critique of Marxism, which has become lost in abstraction and does not see the working class as it really is; it was necessary for Wright to explore \u201cthe dark and hidden places of the personality\u201d. There was a more primordial \u201cworld that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone\u201d. Wright concluded that \u201cthe more total the degradation of the human being, the more total the reaction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Therefore the development of Black people in the United States constituted the \u201cmost total contradiction to Western capitalist society.\u201d<\/p>\n
This, according to Wright, afforded Black nationalism a unique role in world history:<\/p>\n
„a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations, that is aware of the dangers of its position, that knows its ultimate aims are unrealizable within the framework of capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is another version, in fact an inversion of American exceptionalism. In this case the Black worker finds her\/his position so alienated from dominant bourgeois (white) culture, that nationalism becomes \u201cthe highest possible pitch of social consciousness\u201d, embodying an anti-capitalist dynamic. This is to repeat the mistake of James Connolly who, lowering the red flag for the green, declared, \u201cthe cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour\u201d. This is not so much fusing nationalism with socialism as confusing it.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately \u201cself-possession\u201d and \u201cconsciousness of the interdependence of people\u201d are no guarantors of Black freedom. All three of Robinson\u2019s Black radicals visited and praised the Ghanaian revolution of Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist, who oriented to the Stalinist bloc, in the 1950s and 60s while George Padmore and Stokely Carmichael went to play more political roles. But despite Nkrumah\u2019s authoritarian rule \u2014 one-party state, control of media, president for life, etc. \u2014 criticism is mild or absent.<\/p>\n
But this \u201cfact of self-perception\u201d that underpins Black nationalism is key for Robinson; his appeal to the consciousness of the interdependence of people\u201d is an idealised utopia of equality between (capitalist) nations. By it he means both the belief in Black people\u2019s separateness from white (and other) \u201craces\u201d and that this is generated from within Black people\u2019s experiences and nowhere else. Marxism goes from being an inadequate theory to a negation of Black \u201cself-perception\u201d.<\/p>\n
Both Wright and Robinson view the Marxist party as the cynical vehicle for radical whites, who realize they are on the wrong side of history and want to control the Black movement in order to save their own white skins \u2014 and privileges. In The Outsider, a later novel, which Robinson acclaims as a \u201ccritique of class\u201d, Sarah Hunter, the wife of a Black communist, says,<\/p>\n
„Don\u2019t tell me about the nobility of labor, the glorious future. You don\u2019t believe in that. That\u2019s for others, and you damn well know it […]. You Jealous Rebels are intellectuals who know your history and you are anxious not to make the mistakes of your predecessors in rebellious undertaking.“<\/p>\n
The fundamental problem with Black Marxism is its failure to understand Marx\u2019s concept of class. For Robinson it describes a set of characteristics or properties, an identity, which is thrust on real people and ultimately breaks down under the pressure of events. For Marxists, class is a social relationship based on private property of the means of production, which as they develop produce antagonisms between the classes and ultimately revolutions. Classes are therefore fluid, constantly being made and remade, the correlation of forces shifting.<\/p>\n
Marx also believed that the proletariat was a universal class, that is a class that can liberate the other subordinate classes and remake society in its own image; because it is a property-less class that society would abolish private property and therefore class society. But this does not equate to the idea that the working class is homogenous. It is not. Racialised, gendered and child labour exists not just as arbitrary divisions but arise from the form of bourgeois rule: the nation state, the family, imperialism. Hence the bourgeoisie has developed and constantly reinforces ideological underpinnings, racism, sexism, etc., for these forms of super-exploitation, undermining class solidarity with material privileges for the \u201cdominant\u201d race, sex.<\/p>\n
Marxism provides a theory in which race (which is in fact a social construct) can be explained through class. Those like Robinson who insist on the primacy of race over class in the struggle cannot explain the emergence of a Black bourgeoisie and Black autocrats like Nkrumah. Instead they end up apologising and hence delegitimising their opponents among the working class and peasantry, while throwing up warnings and barriers against class solidarity.<\/p>\n
In the end Robinson resorts to identity politics:<\/p>\n
„The distinctions of political space and historical time have fallen away so that the making of one Black collective identity suffuses nationalisms. Harbored in the African diaspora there is a single historical identity that is in opposition to systemic privations of racial capitalism.“<\/p>\n
All Black people, all classes of the oppressed group have this same identity, which enables them to understand their oppression and route to liberation, which is unavailable to any other group. They can sympathise, solidarise even, but they cannot experience racism so they cannot fully understand it or therefore criticise the Black radical tradition. Robinson therefore essentialises Black oppression as a truth that can only be seen from within the group, not from outside of truth.<\/p>\n
As we write elsewhere,<\/p>\n
„essentialising oppression, and in its extreme forms turns into a reactionary relativism. If identity springs directly from common experience, then it is not a historically constituted social relation, but rather a \u201ccharacteristic\u201d of a certain group of people, which is produced biologically, naturally or spontaneously through shared culture or location. Thus identity appears as an unquestionable absolute.“<\/p>\n
It is true that Robinson provides a 500 year historiography of the Black radical tradition but this is only achieved, as we have shown, by being very selective and either ignoring the elements of collective struggle by black people with poor whites, Indians, etc. or declaring that they veered away from the Black radical tradition. The unchanging characteristics \u2014 collectivism, egalitarianism, pacifism and mysticism \u2014 are in his mind absolutes. This too is problematic; why is Robinson\u2019s Black radical tradition true and not, say, Franz Fanon\u2019s, who agreed with the former on the transcendent power of Black nationalism but not on pacifism?<\/p>\n
Relativism comes into play when Robinson offers different absolute truths for the different \u201craces\u201d. As Gregory Myerson has pointed out, Robinson asserts that, \u201cNationalism secures class rule for the Europeans but not for Africans. For the latter, nationalism is self-knowledge not ideology.\u201d The countless nationalisms that have scarred the African continent over the four decades since Black Marxism was written, from Rwanda to the ANC\u2019s South Africa, cannot be judged by material losses, genocides, etc., only by spiritual gains in self-knowledge. Shunning all outside measures of success or failure, Robinson claims, Black nationalism \u201cdeepens with each disappointment at false mediation and reconciliation, and is crystallized into ever-increasing cores by betrayal and repression\u201d.<\/p>\n
None of this is to discount the importance of individual and collective experience of oppression, without which there could be no revolutionary movement. For millions of Black workers in the US and elsewhere, racism is the burning issue facing them and demanding their attention. The consciousness arising from an understanding of this oppression is however only partial, just as the consciousness arising spontaneously from wage labour is partial. Both operate within the framework of bourgeois ideology: full racial equality; a fair day\u2019s work for a fair day\u2019s pay.<\/p>\n
As Lenin wrote:<\/p>\n
„the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology […] our task, the task of Social-Democracy [the revolutionary party], is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.“<\/p>\n
Because of the truly atrocious tradition of the main forces inside the working class movement \u2014 social democracy, Stalinism, the trade union bureaucracy \u2014 on combatting racism in society at large or even within its own ranks, that task in relation to Black workers can only be achieved with special measure: work among Black communities; Black papers and media; Black caucuses and fighting organisations; the promotion of Black leaders. If economism \u2014 the failure to see racist oppression as key to the Black experience or to place the fight against it as central to the socialist programme \u2014 is the main problem facing the socialist and workers\u2019 movement, then offering empty platitudes, which are not backed up with theory and action designed to divert the struggle in a socialist direction is surely another.<\/p>\n
If a socialist organisation, such as the DSA, took such an approach, attentively listening to Black comrades and collectively working out a programme of action linking the struggles for Black liberation to the struggle for socialism, then in the current period this could yield big steps forward for the movement. This will necessarily involve intense discussions between black and white communists engaged in common struggles alongside Black nationalists and radicals.<\/p>\n
1\u2003Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (New York: Basic Books, 1993).<\/p>\n
2\u2003Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (London: Penguin Classics, 2021), 288.<\/p>\n
3\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 2.<\/p>\n
4\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 85.<\/p>\n
5\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 4.<\/p>\n
6\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 19.<\/p>\n
7\u2003Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers, 1985).<\/p>\n
8\u2003Quoted in Vladimir Lenin, \u201cKarl Marx,\u201d Collected Works vol.21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 43.<\/p>\n
9\u2003Marx, \u201cTheses on Feuerbach,\u201d Marx-Engels Selected Works vol.1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 6.<\/p>\n
10\u2003Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (London: Verso, 2012).<\/p>\n
11\u2003See Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020) ch. 1 and 2; and Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).<\/p>\n
12\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 65.<\/p>\n
13\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 63\u201364.<\/p>\n
14\u2003Most famously, Marx observes that capital comes into this world \u201cdripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.\u201d Capital, vol. 1, (London: Penguin, 1974), 926.<\/p>\n
15\u2003Marx, \u201cAddress to the Central Committee of the Communist League\u201d, Marx-Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 278.<\/p>\n
16\u2003Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the \u2018Nonhistoric\u2019 Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848 (Glasgow: Critique, 1987).<\/p>\n
17\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 63.<\/p>\n
18\u2003Lenin, \u201cCritical Remarks on the National Question\u201d, Collected Works vol. 20 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 17.<\/p>\n
19\u2003Leon Trotsky, \u201cOn the South African Theses\u201d, Writings 1934\u20135 (New York: Pathfinder, 1974).<\/p>\n
20\u2003Quoted in James P Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism, (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), 230-31.<\/p>\n
21\u2003John Riddell, Towards the United Front (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 947\u201351.<\/p>\n
22\u2003Riddell, Towards the United Front, 226.<\/p>\n
23\u2003Trotsky, On Black Nationalism, marxists.org\/archive\/trotsky\/works\/1940\/negro1.htm.<\/p>\n
24\u2003Trotsky, On Black Nationalism.<\/p>\n
25\u2003Trotsky, On Black Nationalism.<\/p>\n
26\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 322.<\/p>\n
27\u2003Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pathfinder, 1970).<\/p>\n
28\u2003Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx, 71.<\/p>\n
29\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 73.<\/p>\n
30\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 81\u201382.<\/p>\n
31\u2003Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955).<\/p>\n
32\u2003John Bellamy Foster, \u201cMarx and Slavery,\u201d Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (2020): monthlyreview.org\/2020\/07\/01\/marx-and-slavery\/.<\/p>\n
33\u2003Marx, Grundrisse (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), ch. 9.<\/p>\n
35\u2003Marx, Capital vol. 3, 809.<\/p>\n
36\u2003Quoted in Foster, \u201cMarx and Slavery\u201d.<\/p>\n
37\u2003Foster, \u201cMarx and Slavery\u201d.<\/p>\n
38\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 150.<\/p>\n
39\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 135.<\/p>\n
40\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 137.<\/p>\n
41\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 138.<\/p>\n
42\u2003Stuart B Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 125.<\/p>\n
43\u2003Stuart B Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 124.<\/p>\n
44\u2003Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 125.<\/p>\n
45\u2003Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.<\/p>\n
46\u2003Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 105.<\/p>\n
47\u2003John Simkin, Spartacus, 2020, spartacus-educational.com\/IRworkhouse.htm<\/p>\n
48\u2003Marx, Capital vol. 1, 877\u2013895.<\/p>\n
49\u2003Quoted in Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.<\/p>\n
50\u2003Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 138.<\/p>\n
51\u2003Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 127, 138.<\/p>\n
52\u2003Quoted in Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 139.<\/p>\n
53\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 287.<\/p>\n
54\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 364.<\/p>\n
55\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 278.<\/p>\n
56\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 282.<\/p>\n
57\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism.<\/p>\n
58\u2003WEB Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44\u201368.<\/p>\n
59\u2003Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 313.<\/p>\n
60\u2003Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 294.<\/p>\n
61\u2003Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 196.<\/p>\n
62\u2003Marx and Engels, Collected Works vol. 41, 277.<\/p>\n
63\u2003James, \u201cStalinism and Negro History,\u201d Fourth International 10, no. 10 (1949) marxists.org\/archive\/james-clr\/works\/1949\/11\/stalinism-negro.htm.<\/p>\n
64\u2003Marx, \u201cTo Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America,\u201d The Bee-Hive Newspaper, no. 169 (1865), www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/iwma\/documents\/1864\/lincoln-letter.htm.<\/p>\n
65\u2003Marx, \u201cTo the People of the USA,\u201d The Workmen\u2019s Advocate, no. 136 (1865), marxists.org\/history\/international\/iwma\/documents\/1865\/to-americans.htm.<\/p>\n
66\u2003James, Notes on Dialectics (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), 117.<\/p>\n
67\u2003James wrote Notes in collaboration with his Russian co-thinker Raya Dunayevskaya.<\/p>\n
68\u2003In James\u2019 last interview he restated his belief that \u201cMarxist theory is a scientific, intellectual theory such as the world has never seen before, and properly used, properly thought of\u201d can serve as a guide to action, marxists.org\/archive\/james-clr\/works\/1989\/04\/interview.html.<\/p>\n
69\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 292.<\/p>\n
70\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 293.<\/p>\n
71\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 296\u201399.<\/p>\n
72\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 299\u2013300.<\/p>\n
73\u2003James Connolly, \u201cThe Irish Flag,\u201d Workers\u2019 Republic, 8 April 1916, marxists.org\/archive\/connolly\/1916\/04\/irshflag.htm.<\/p>\n
74\u2003Du Bois went and died there, working on a Ghanaian encyclopaedia; James wrote a book, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, libcom.org\/files\/CLR-James-Nkrumah-Ghana-Revolution.pdf; Wright wrote Black Power after his visits in 1954 and 1957.<\/p>\n
75\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 317.<\/p>\n
76\u2003Martin Suchanek, \u201cA Critique of Identity as a Political Programme\u201d, League for the Fifth International, 12 March, 2021, fifthinternational.org\/content\/critique-identity-political-programme<\/p>\n
78\u2003Martin Suchanek, \u201cA Critique of Identity as a Political Programme\u201d, for a more detailed account of Fanon as a precursor of identity politics.<\/p>\n
79\u2003Gregory Myerson, \u201cRethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,\u201d Cultural Logic, no. 6 (2000).<\/p>\n
80\u2003Robinson, Black Marxism, 317.<\/p>\n
81\u2003Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 41.<\/p>\n
82\u2003Within the \u201cTrotskyist\u201d tradition the ICL (Spartacists) and the IST (SWP GB) are certainly guilty of minimising Black oppression or white privilege.<\/p>\n
83\u2003Angela Davis and Ken Olende (SWP-GB) have both sought to fudge the differences between Robinson\u2019s Black Marxism and authentic revolutionary Marxism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeremy Dewar First published in Fifth International 21 The killing of George Floyd by racist cop Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on 26 May 2020 revealed how far the liberation of the USA\u2019s Black citizens still had to go. Donald Trump\u2019s presidency had been marked by his repeated praise for the killer cops as heroes and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,140,1],"tags":[168,104,197,350,196],"class_list":["post-3421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antifacism-antiracism","category-debates","category-uncategorized","tag-antiracism","tag-archive","tag-black-liberation","tag-fifth-international-21","tag-polemic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3421"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7902,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421\/revisions\/7902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}