Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Reactionary Work for a Counterrevolutionary Project

There is an international political economy of knowledge production, as ideas and theoretical debates are in many ways determined by material reality. Why is it that some concepts circulate so widely while others are a priori dismissed? Why is it that some seemingly radical frameworks find so much support in U.S. universities, while others are caricatured and demonized with allegedly “radical” justification?

Consider Gabriel Rockhill’s recent research on the erasure of the Marxist foundations of critical theory due to the material circumstances and ideologies of its leaders, who helped the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory “corral critique within the liberal fold,” serving “to recuperate potential radicals within the ideological consensus that a world beyond capitalism and pseudo-democracy is not only impossible but undesirable.”^[1] He documents the material incentives and other mechanisms used to recruit critical theorists into the service of imperialism to form a “compatible, non-communist Left over and against the threat of actually existing socialism.”^[2]

This class war in theory is waged in many forms and on many fronts, one of which is, unfortunately, Black Studies and the Black Radical Tradition, which were forced into the university by the long and increasingly militant struggle led by Marxists and Leninists, Pan-Africanists, Black Nationalists, and other revolutionaries. Within a decade, their revolutionary origins were purged and reduced to culturalism, or “the regime of meaning making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through statist technologies of antiradicalism.”^[3] Multiple factors facilitated this, from Ford Foundation funding and non-profits to careerism and intra-left divisions. The right-wing turn of Black Studies was and is, I argue, facilitated by Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of The Black Radical Tradition.

The forces behind Black Studies

The forces creating Black Studies were particular expressions of a global revolutionary struggle, an era from 1945 until the early 1980s when the oppressed classes threw off the shackles of their oppressors, dramatically reshaping the world. The Soviet Union, despite its tremendous losses, came out of the WWII as the second major world power, and the one that liberated or aided in the liberation of peoples in Europe, Africa, and Asia. With the defeat of the European imperialists and the Soviet Union’s aid, a wave of national liberation struggles and revolutions spread like a wildfire in Korea and Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua, Angola and Mozambique, Iraq and Syria, Indonesia and Afghanistan. All of these struggles were supported by the Soviet Union which provided economic, political, and military resources.

A global counterrevolution was launched in the late 1980s as global capitalism and white supremacy launched a full-scale counteroffensive against the oppressed classes of the world, whether their governments were socialist, nationalist, or merely unwilling to bow to the United States’ dictates.

Robinson’s Black Marxism was a product of this era of global counterrevolution. This is not to say that he intentionally wrote or designed the book to represent a compromise of revolution without revolution, of course, but that it must be understood in this broader context.

In analyzing Black Studies today, Jonathan Fenderson highlights how culture and ideas become determinant, thereby producing “an African Diaspora essentialism.” Black Marxism circulates so well because its “abandonment of class fits perfectly well with contemporary trends in African American Studies.^[4] This is, perhaps, why the latest release came on the heels of the historic 2020 anti-racist uprisings in the U.S.

Rebellion over Revolution

My critique isn’t to defend the “great” Marx, but to reveal how the arguments and overall conclusions dismiss revolution in favor of general and vague rebellions. The book uses radical phraseology and incorrect critiques of Marxism in the service of culturalism and reformism, corralling the radical origins of Black Studies into liberalism. “The Black Radical Tradition,” for Robinson requires a “break” with Marxism and the history of the revolutionary socialist and national liberation struggles. Marxism served as entry points to Black radicals, but one that was “ultimately unsatisfactory,” which led to “Black radicalism and the discovery of a collective Black resistance inspired by an enduring cultural complex of historical apprehension.”^[5]

In his latest foreword, Robin Kelly tries to rescue the book as a revolutionary text by claiming “is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist,” but is rather “a dialectical critique of Marxism that turned to the long history of Black revolt… to construct a wholly original theory of revolution. Yet he ends up conceding that “apprehending the Black Radical Tradition required a break with Marx and Engels’s historical materialism.”^[6]

Robinson’s inaccurate retelling of Marx—which includes little engagement with Marx and relies mostly on sectarian and imperialist academic scholarship—supposedly proves that, “at its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction” whose “philosophical origins are indisputably Western,” as are “its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view.”^[7] It is as if the ideas or conceptions available in England were solely the result of work and history within those borders, as if what happened in those borders wasn’t global, and as if the origins of a theory or particular expression of a theory inevitably tie it to that moment and place and society. More foundationally, of course, no epistemological system or substratum exists outside of the larger totality. By dividing Marxism and the world between the “West” and the rest—or the “West” and the “Black”—Robinson actually reaffirms Eurocentrism, centering the “West” and reducing it to Europe.

Robinson never engages with the theories and works of communists who were Black or of oppressed races or nationalities in the U.S and abroad who, like Lenin and Marx, viewed the Black liberation struggle as the class struggle. In the process, he fixes Marxism into a static theory rather than the living and breathing guide to action that it truly is, which is why the very notion that there is a “white” or “European” Marxism is reactionary and even racist, denying how African and other peoples contributed and continue to contribute to Marxism, from Walter Rodney and Dr. Américo Boavida to Kim Il-Sung and José Carlos Mariátegui. It also rests on a fundamental misreading of Marx’s own work, organizing, and development, which shows his support for anti-colonial rebellions and even his theory that those forces might be the revolutionary vanguard to inspire the socialist revolutions in Britain!^[8]

Marx, Slavery, and Capitalism

Robinson claims slavery was placed what “Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation,’” relegating it to a distant past, “assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history.”^[9] The alleged inability to link U.S. racial slavery with capitalism discredits historical materialism and “the dialectical of capitalist class struggles.”^[10]

Marx never termed anything “primitive accumulation;” bourgeois political economists did. This is why Part 8 of Capital is titled “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation!” The point of this section, the crux of Capital, is to reveal what the bourgeoisie covered up with its fairytale justifying oppression and exploitation: that the poor are poor because they were lazy and wasteful while the rich are rich because they were smart and hard-working. Marx’s argument is that capital was so advanced in England because of its position as a leading colonial power within the global balance of forces: because of the brutal conquest of territories and peoples, murder and terrorism, slavery, looting, the African slave trade, and much more. He didn’t claim it was finished but that it was a “vicious circle,” meaning that capital must continually produce its preconditions while trying to relegate them to a past time.^[11]

Never did Marx relegate slavery into a pre-history of capitalism. He saw slavery and capital as co-existing and, moreover, as different modes of production that could occupy the same space and time. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx refers to the United States as the “most developed form of existence of bourgeois society” even though capitalism and slavery were both present.^[12] Both existed as modes of production, as just a few pages earlier Marx clarifies that a country’s production has to be “structured to allow of slave labour, or (as in the southern part of America etc.) a mode of production corresponding to the slave must be created.”^[13]

Robinson merely declares we are “approaching the limits” to “orthodox Marxism” to begin constructing a universal and abstract Black radical tradition, presenting a sweeping picture of a quite vast, numerous, and homogenous Black people, and world history as a struggle between “Blacks and their oppressors.”^[14] Highlighting flashpoints in Black struggles is crucial, but he does this to claim a property essentialized in Blackness or a series of “the African identities of its peoples” about which we learn nothing.^[15] This alone justifies abandoning the Marxist project of revolution for what he, without any shame, calls an “epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics not the material.”^[16] Culturalism over politics; a new political economy of knowledge.

The “Anti-Communist” Communist Party Member Du Bois

The first to reach these limits is, shockingly, W.E.B. Du Bois, which reveals Robinson’s project isn’t about dividing or building on Marxism, but of divorcing it from the Black struggle. Robinson says Du Bois believed the need for multinational unity were ones “spokesmen for Communism ignored.”^[17] In this narrative, Robinson repeatedly cites Daniel Bell, the same one who participated in the anti-communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom that combatted communist and pro-communist intellectual thought (with CIA funding).^[18] This lets Robinson dismiss Black Reconstruction’s Marxism. Yet Du Bois’ scholars Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne note that he was a socialist since the early 1900s and that, “by the 1930s, he had begun to diligently study Marxism-Leninism and to update it with his own insights about the Black experience,” which is why the book is his “Black Marxist tome.”^[19]

Robinson never mentions Du Bois died as a member of the Communist Party to invent a towering Black intellectual increasingly at odds with Marxism. He once mentions Du Bois’ amazement at the Bolshevik Revolution when he first visited in 1927. Due, in large part, to his first-hand experiences with the absence of capitalism and racism in the Soviet Union, Du Bois admired the communist struggle. Black radicals that visited the USSR experienced equality only to return home to an apartheid regime in the U.S.^[20] So firmly did Du Bois support the USSR that he openly defended their intervention to repress the attempted 1956 counterrevolution in Hungary.^[21]

Du Bois, like other Black communists in the U.S. and globally, knew how socialist states helped the oppressed free themselves and the real material gains that resulted, until the Soviet Union’s collapse. They provided educational, military, and other material support to the African continent from Egypt and Libya to Angola, Ghana, and Mozambique.

Perhaps the lesson we learn from the text comes from the absence of the actual material victories of African, Black, and other oppressed classes. This is the most crucial question for us as organizers and intellectuals who want to participate in creating a better world. The origins of a particular theory do not matter; what it has helped us win does. No theory can be proven on paper; that takes practice, and the real gains of the oppressed should guide the production of knowledge.

NOTES

1. Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory: For the Reinvention of Critique in the Age of Ideological Realignment,” in Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique, ed. D. Benson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 117-118. ↑

2. Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” The Philosophical Salon (June 2022): < https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism> (accessed on January 09, 2023). ↑

3. Charisse Burden-Stelly, “Black Studies in the Westernized University,” in Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73). ↑

4. Jonathan Fenderson, “Black Studies Post-Janus,” The Black Scholar 48, no. 4 (2018): 3. ↑

5. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983/2020), 5. ↑

6. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Foreword: Why Black Marxism? Why Now? In C.J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3^rd ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), xix. ↑

7. Black Marxism, 2. ↑

8. Lucia Pradella, Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings (New York: Routledge, 2015). ↑9

9. Black Marxism, 4. ↑

10. Ibid. ↑

11. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 667. See also Derek R. Ford, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Unlearning, Aesthetics, and the Sensations of Struggle (Madison: Iskra, 2023), 27-46. ↑

12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1973), 104. ↑

13. Ibid., 98. ↑

14. Robinson, Black Marxism, 168. ↑

15. Ibid., 166. ↑

16. Ibid., 169. ↑

17. Ibid., 197. ↑

18. Edward Shils and Peter Coleman, “Remembering the Congress of Cultural Freedom,” Society 46 (2009): 437. ↑

19. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2019), 203 ↑

20. Peta Lindsay, “Black Bolsheviks and White Lies,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017). ↑

21. W.E.B. Du Bois. “Socialism and Democracy: A Debate,” The American Socialist January (1957): 6-9. ↑