Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

by Cedric J. Robinson

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.

To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, Theory, Philosophy, Anti Racist

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 24, 1983

About the author

Cedric Robinson was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research.

Reviews

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent theoretical and historical story about slavery, oppression, Marxism, and an intellectual history of Dubois, Wright and other black radicals. It is like 8 books in one--all of them worth reading. The title does not quite describe what this book is about--it is a critique of Marxism. Marxism was stuck in Feudalistic problems and was Eurocentric. Robinson talks about the state of the world around Europe (the Islamic world and Africa) and how those trends were forgotten even though they were the principle threat to Europe. This part was actually the weakest part of the book for me. Then he moves to discuss the Haitian slave rebellion and the various rebellions in the states and how that was the genesis of black radicalism in this continent. My favorite part is the praising of W.E.B. Dubois. I have long been convinced that he is America's greatest thinker/philosopher/writer and yet every time I hear him referenced anywhere, they seem to get him wrong or just focus on a tiny portion of his vast repertoire (like the talented tenth idea). Dubois was a radical thinker. He foresaw the problems of this century and accurately described the history of America. Not just Black America but American civilization. Excellent book

[Quin Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for fun with a friend who is by far better informed about Marxist theory than I am. Which was important, because although Black Marxism is a rewarding read, it is at times a dense and difficult one.

The argument is that an autonomous, Black radical tradition exists outside of Western Marxism. This book offers an important corrective to hegemonic Western historiography and white Marxism.

However, the author somehow failed to discuss gender or sexuality in any significant way, making for an androcentric text that ignores the crucial contributions of Black women to the struggle for Black liberation. As my friend pointed out, Ida B. Wells did the essential work of exposing lynching as white supremacist violence. How could any account of a Black radical tradition overlook her work, as just one example of many. This was a deeply disappointing component of the text. As such, I would recommend this book be supplemented with Dorothy Robert's Killing the Black Body, Angela Y. Davis' Women, Race, & Class, and Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought as necessary complements to this text.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I first bought this book six years ago, on a whim in leftist bookstore. After a glance at Robin Kelley's introduction, I decided the book was best put aside until I could devote some real time to it. Kelley's description of the book's momentous accomplishment, its range of erudition, and its radical challenge to Marxist theory proved a bit intimidating, and I resolved to return to the work when I could devote the appropriate amount of time to the encounter.

Having just turned the last page, I have to say that the wait was not worth it. Though extensively documented and exceptionally wide ranging, Black Marxism is a bad book. I simply cannot imagine any reader who has a decent acquaintance with Marxist theory being convinced by any of the claims raised against it in this work. To seize on a small but telling example, Robinson refers on multiple occasions to the 'contradiction between the mode of production and the relations of production.' Now, as anyone even basically familiar with Marxist theory would tell you, a mode of production is the result of a certain combination of the forces of production (technology and organization of the labor process) and the relations of production (how the exploiting class appropriates the surplus from the producing class). While the forces and relations may come into conflict, there is no such thing as a contradiction between the relations and the mode. This may seem the height of sectarian quibbling, but it reveals a rather appalling ignorance on Robinson's part. What kind of critique of Marxism can we expect from someone who cannot even discuss its most basic conceptual architecture?

Unfortunately, this is only one example of the sloppiness which pervades Black Marxism. Perhaps the gravest example of this is Robinson's definition of capitalism. While Marx held that capitalism was a system of competitive accumulation based on wage labor, Robinson more or less equates capitalism with large scale mercantile activity. As Robert Brenner pointed out long ago (and as Robinson should have known), this is Adam Smith's definition of capitalism, not Karl Marx's. Robinson's efforts to score points against Marx by pointing out the various ways in which mercantile activity in early modern Europe contradicted Marx's account of capital are thus only so many sorties mounted against windmills.

In short, Black Marxism is a book which relies for its effectiveness on its readership's ignorance of the object of its critique. While parts of the book are informative (the sections on the slave trade and on slave resistance, for example), the overall thrust of the book is towards caricature and misrepresentation. This is unfortunate, as a rigorous critique of Marxism from the perspective of an autonomous black radical tradition could be an important work.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of immense scope and impressive in its immensity. It felt absolutely overwhelming as I read it, but going back over it, it feels more like some kind of treasure trove that will continue to yield new things every time you open its cover -- so some initial lengthy yet also paradoxically brief notes...

It begins at the European beginning of Capitalism, going through the rise of the bourgeoisie through first cities, then absolutist and colonial states. As Robinson states: "European civilization is not the product of capitalism. On the contrary, the character of capitalism can only be understood in the social and historical context of its appearance." [25] And because this is true, the age-old conceptions of race, enemy and exploitable other simply translated itself into new terms as the world changed: "As an enduring principle of European social order, the effects of racialism were bound to appear in the social expression of every strata of every European society no matter the structures upon which they were formed. None was immune. [29]"

He moves on then to look at the English working class, and how their formation was also entwined with racialism. Marx and Engels both acknowledged the existence of racial divisions, but believed that these would be erased as capitalism developed, even though there did not appear to be signs of it happening. As Robinson pointedly notes:

Neither Marx nor Engels were unaware of the proletariat's failure to become a universal class.76 Both studied the Irish Question closely, were active in the attempt to resolve its destructive impact on the historical processes of English working-class formation, and commented on its import for future proletarian organization. Nevertheless, the impact of their experience with the English proletariat on their theory of the proletariat's historical role appears to have been slight. [51]

He's scathing of the whole Socialist tradition really, particularly in its early stages, and in my opinion entirely rightly. Its solid basis lies in the bourgeoisie itself, with no connection to the working classes:

It is a period dominated by eccentrics, visionaries, and didacts. The wistful trails of Godwin, Paine, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Pecquer, lesser and grander lights, preoccupy the historians, along with the most often short-lived utopian communities associated with some ofthem. The agitations, rebellions, riots, and struggles of artisans, wage laborers, peasants, and slave laborers are largely irrelevant to the tradition in the early nineteenth century and mostly constitute a background "noise" in this the era of the socialist writer. ... Their work becomes a demonstration of the independence of socialist theory and social movements from one another. When once again they collide, in the 1840S, 1870S, and early 1900S, each had assumed forms and prerogatives only slightly tolerable to those of the other.

He returns Marx to his time and place, from 1848 to the rise of Bismarck in 1862. He traces the ambiguities of Marx and Engels' positions on nationalism, and argues that they did not understand it, in the same way that they failed to understand racialism: that it was neither an aberration nor a stage, but something as determined by history as their world revolution failed to be. He argues that ideologies have in fact "helped to abort those social and historical processes believed to be necessary and inevitable; have catalyzed rebellions and revolutions in often unlikely circumstances and among unlikely peoples; and have assisted in extraordinary historical achievement where failure was "objectively" immanent." [82]

Only then do we return to race:

In short, there were at least four distinct moments that must be apprehended in European racialism; two whose origins are to be found within the dialectic of European development, and two that are not:

1. the racial ordering of European society from its formative period, which extends into the medieval and feudal ages as "blood" and racial beliefs and legends.
2. the Islamic (i.e., Arab, Persian, Turkish, and African) domination of Mediterranean civilization and the consequent retarding of European social and cultural life: the Dark Ages.
3. the incorporation of African, Asian, and peoples of the New World into the world system emerging from late feudalism and merchant capitalism.
4. the dialectic of colonialism, plantocratic slavery, and resistance from the sixteenth century forward, and the formations of industrial labor and labor reserves.

It is now a convention to begin the analysis of racism in Western societies with the third moment; entirely ignoring the first and second and only partially coming to terms with the fourth. ... In each instance, the root of the methodological and conceptual flaws is the same: the presumption that the social and historical processes that matter, which are determinative, are European. All else, it seems, is derivative.

This book is a refutation of such a framework. It proceeds to look at moments of struggle, rebellion and uprising in Africa and its diaspora flung across the world by the European slave trade. He writes:

Black radicalism, consequently, cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis. It is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black. Rather, it is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization: [97]

Robinson finds how this was ignored in a deep historical look at previous contacts between Blacks and whites, the shift of Blacks being seen as Islamic militants and soldiers to slaves and a very different set of stereotypes. From there he looks at the long history of the slave trade, mentioned earlier was the Italian trafficking of 'Tartars' and 'Poles' and 'Cathays', but now it has expanded into the extraordinary movement of tens of thousands of people in the trans-Atlantic trade. Thus we arrive at black radicalism. As he states at the opening of chapter 6:

However, Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks-men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.
This was the embryo of the demon that would be visited on the whole enterprise of primitive accumulation. [173]

And thus follows a whole splendid history of Black resistance through the ages, uprisings and revolts, some of the marron comunities you might have heard of like Palmares but many that you probably have not. It ends with Africa: Revolt at the Source. In delving deeper into the nature of the Black radical tradition, he finds in fact that "one note has occurred and recurred: the absence of mass violence." [242], in contrast to the 'massive and often indiscriminate' brutality of the Europeans in quelling such revolts. He claims that such an absence shows that

This was a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.
It becomes clear, then, that for the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, it was an African tradition that grounded collective resistance by Blacks to slavery and colonial imperialism.

He goes on to argue for a particularly African tradition of granting primacy to the metaphysical, not the material. A tradition of resistance through collectivity. I'm not entirely convinced by the psychology of it, but there's definitely something there. "They lived on their terms, they died on their terms, they obtained their freedom on their terms." He argues that this cast doubt on the idea that capitalism was able to 'penetrate and reform' all social life, or strip life down to bare survival.

The book then moves on to the third section: the formation of the Black intelligentsia. He looks at W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James and Richard Wright. It is an immensely rich look at DuBois, my favourite passage distilling some of the wealth in Black Reconstruction:

And in every instance, peasants and agrarian workers had been the primary social bases of rebellion and revolution. Nowhere, not
even in Russia, where a rebellious urban proletariat was a fraction of the mobilized working classes, had a bourgeois social order formed a precondition for revolutionary struggle. Revolutionary consciousness had formed in the process of antiimperialist and nationalist struggles, and the beginnings of resistance had often been initiated by ideological constructions remote from the proletarian consciousness that was a presumption of Marx's theory of revolution. The idiom of revolutionary consciousness had been historical and cultural rather than the "mirror of production." The oppositions that had struck most deeply at capitalist domination and imperialism had been those formed outside the logic of bourgeois hegemony. [324]

C.L.R. James loved fiction! Who knew. This section looks more at his critiques of Marxism, some interesting reflections on Black Jacobins and this interesting passage: "It implied (and James did not see this) that bourgeois culture and thought and ideology were irrelevant to the development of revolutionary consciousness among Black and other Third World peoples. It broke with the evolutionist chain in, the closed dialectic of, historical materialism." [386]

And the section on Wright, so rich on how writing and experience and political consciousness fold together, there is so much here, I can't sum up. There's this:

For Wright, it was not sufficient for Black liberation that his people come to terms with the critique of capitalist society. He had observed: "Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life."55 As a critique of capitalist society, Marxism was necessary, of course, but it was ultimately an internal critique. The epistemological nature of historical materialism took bourgeois society on its own terms, that is, presuming the primacy of economic forces and structures.56 As such, the historical development from feudalism of the bourgeoisie as a class served as a logical model for the emergence of the proletariat as a negation of capitalist society. Wright appeared quite early to have understood this thesis as a fundamental error in Marxist thought. Even as early as 1937, he had begun to argue that it was necessary that Blacks transform the Marxist critique into an expression of their own emergence as a negation of Western capitalism.

Brilliant stuff on ideology and violence, the importance of experience, but I will let Robinson himself do the final summing up of the contributions of each to a valid theory of liberation:

DuBois

It was, DuBois observed, from the periphery and not the center that the most sustained threat to the American capitalist system had materialized. ... Just as important for him, however, was the realization that the racism of the American "white" working classes and their general ideological immaturity had abnegated the extent to which the conditions of capitalist production and relations alone could be held responsible for the social development of the American proletariat. The collective and individual identities of American workers had responded as much to race as they had to class. The relations of production were not determinant. [448]

James

No revolutionary cadre, divorced from the masses, ensconced in state bureaucracy, and abrogating to itself the determination of the best interests of the masses, could sustain the revolution or itself. [449]

Wright

Wright evoked in his writings the language and experience of"ordinary" Black men and women. In this way he pressed home the recognition that whatever the objective forces propelling a people toward struggle, resistance, and revolution, they would come to that struggle in their own cultural terms. [449]

And my final quote which I believe deserves much thought:

Western Marxism, in either of its two variants-critical-humanist or scientific-has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation. [451]

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of Black Marxism is admirable, and consists basically of two theses: 1) capitalism by itself will not create revolutionary consciousness among working people, there is a need for a subjective, ideological intervention, and 2) there is such a thing as a historically-grounded, relatively ideologically-coherent thing as a ‘Black radical tradition’, which harkens back to communal social forms in Africa and has persisted through centuries of slavery and brutal repression around the globe. Both of these claims are quite interesting and politically important. The first is correct, but far from new: this has been the entire problematic of almost all post-19th century Marxists in Eurasia, and the dominant concern of so-called ‘Western Marxism’. The second, far more novel thesis, deserves a central place in revolutionary theory, especially in the United States. The fact that Robinson’s peculiar argument fails to convince on this front should not invalidate the central importance of that project itself. The book is valuable as a partial intellectual history, with admirable, rarely-paralleled breadth. Especially in chapter 6, Robinson brings together a tragically neglected history of African diasporic revolt, which should be foundational reading for every leftist.

The main arguments of the book, however, are frustratingly made through implication, bouts of unsupported polemical zeal, and disconnected, sweeping assertions. Through the various, and mutually exclusive characterizations of Marx and subsequent Marxist theories in the book, it’s pretty clear that Robinson doesn’t have a firm grasp of Marxism as a critique of capitalism. That alone doesn’t invalidate the arguments though – after all, many insightful and persuasive books have been written by non-Marxists.

For Robinson, the reality of capitalist expansion in Europe resulted not from the material constraints and imperatives of market relations, but an ideological surplus of racism. For example, he claims that for English workers, this racism that steered history over and above material relations of production ultimately became uniform across the class, and exceptions are dismissed as utterly inconsequential (41). Robinson’s focus on the subjective core of capitalism’s rise in Europe (the project of a merchant class, driven by their own cultures and metaphysical traditions), is an important part of the argument in order to set up the obverse: the persistence of the Black Radical Tradition as a cultural, experiential, and psychological force across history (cf. 169). Citing Marx’s ‘ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class’ dictum, he states that the “European proletariat had been formed through the ideas of the bourgeoisie,” whereas “in Haiti and presumably elsewhere among slave populations, the Africans had constructed their own revolutionary culture” (275).

The second part of the book, “The Roots of Black Radicalism,” traces the historical (under)development of Africa, through the Atlantic slave trade and the various rebellions, insurrections, and maroonages of North and South America, all of which provided a historical foundation of experience for a coherent, collective Black Radical Tradition. The argument cuts against the racist historiography that has deprived enslaved people of agency, dignity, and politics, and reinstates a framework for a collective experience and revolutionary assertion of Black people, based ultimately in a shared African origin. Black slave resistance in some of its earliest stages took the form of marronage in order to retreat from contact, to “reconstitute the community” (310). These maroon communities appeared everywhere, from the Palmares in Brazil with over ten thousand people, to the small collections of runaways hiding in swamps or around the plantations of the American South. In the Palmares and in the British West Indies, obeah men and women (magical practitioners) were often the ideological source for slave rebellions (136), the height of which of course was the Haitian revolution. In San Domingo, where the majority of the Black population was African-born, voodoo provided the “medium of the conspiracy” (CLR James), and the maroons were an “integral part of the disparate elements that crystallized into the Haitian Revolution” (147). Slave rebellions proliferated in Brazil, Jamaica and the British West Indies, and even back to the source in Africa. “The peoples of Africa and the African diaspora had endured an integrating experience that left them not only with a common task but a shared vision” (166).

For Robinson, enslaved Black people in the Americas rebelled not because all humans resist and rebel when put into intolerable situations, but because of the inherited memory of their African past, a “world-consciousness drawn from African lore” (314). The obvious contradiction – that other people who do not share that historical memory also rebel, and frequently – goes unacknowledged and unaddressed. This is because Robinson is concerned not with historical causality or comparative material explanations, but rather offers an intellectual history with pretensions to displace materialist analyses.

This method runs up against a rather basic problem: How to explain the “radical” part of the “Black Radical Tradition” without resort to material explanations? The materialist argument, even a bad one, would point toward the fact that Africa, by and large, was subjected to colonization on a systematic scale incomparable to the systemic oppressions faced within Europe. Because the majority of Africans were oppressed, they fought back against that oppression, and developed traditions around that resistance; whereas because the majority of Europeans benefitted from colonialism (a debatable claim itself, but useful for argument’s sake here) they mostly collaborated with capitalist expansion and developed traditions justifying European dominance and capitalist rule. This is not Robinson’s argument, however.

For Robinson, the radicalism within the Black tradition has its source in a shared transhistorical culture (beliefs, habits, cosmology, morality, etc) among the whole of the African populations and diaspora. While common culture certainly can provide some explanation for many collective efforts at radical, idealistic overhaul of material conditions, it cannot alone explain why some among the African diaspora joined maroon settlements or made the Haitian revolution, others found various ways to survive in their circumstances without attempting to change them at point of death, and still others collaborated in the slave trade in Africa. Robinson’s framework simply does not provide the tools to explain these different outcomes.

There is a real question about the persistence of a Black liberation movement as a fairly coherent wellspring of radicalism, which perhaps cannot be totally explained by the characteristics of slavery and American capitalism. But explaining the grounds for and genealogy of that kind of subjective tradition (or impulse to what Rosa Luxemburg approvingly called ‘idealism’) vis-à-vis the changing of material constraints and circumstances would necessarily marshal the same kinds of factors as an explanation of ‘idealistic’ rebellions among European white workers, or Chinese peasants, or Native American tribes. Historical materialism would point toward some combination of traditions of human dignity and material circumstances of oppression that infringe on those traditions/expectations/morality and thus shape resistances in specific ways.

It is correct to assert that material constraints cannot entirely explain the course of historical development – people make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. It is both the constraints and the people-made history, of course, in different proportions according to different historical moments. But Robinson’s book is a hard polemic, making the case that “people make their own history” regardless of circumstances, and they make both good (rebellions) and bad (capitalist) history. It is, in other words, a polemic against materialism, historical or otherwise. Although this book offers an interesting intellectual study, there still remains a need for a real history of and argument for the global Black radical tradition, even as the works of many Black radicals have gone a long way toward filling in these gaps.

[Imani ♥ ☮ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to be reading this book for the rest of my life.

[Mars · Rating 4 out of 5]

lol i usually don't write reviews but for any1 interested - this book was extremely dense as far as the breadth of its historical scope and theoretical analysis (and i have never actually read marx shh...) but i would say if you are at all interested in the history of the Black radical tradition / confused about why Black radicalism and Western socialism often conflict ideologically - reading just the introduction and conclusion of this book will be VERY helpful in condensing centuries of the histories of capitalism/colonialism/imperialism and forms of resistance to these systems. (but also warning that this book fails to include gender in its analysis of race/class yikes)

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those extremely rare works of scholarship that towers so high above others that it just about takes your breath away. BLACK MARXISM is in that rare class of books with the power to radically transform one's worldview, and the words one has been using to describe it. Impeccable as a work of historiography, but even more incredible as a work of Marxist theory.

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just marvellous. I don't always agree with the readings of marxism, but the 'black radical tradition' is presented with an overwhelming density, and the recitations about DuBois, James, and Wright are effective.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated this as a good faith and thoughtful critique of Marx(ism). So much critique of Marx in Black studies is "Marx never talked about racism!" which is simply not true (although not his primary focus, Marx was very interested in slavery and colonialism). Robinson takes a different approach, beginning by critiquing Marx for not being attentive to the power of nationalism as both a revolutionary and counter revolutionary force. For example, Marx suggests England as a route place for revolution, not considering how English-Irish tensions actually disrupt the possibility of worker solidarity. It follows that Marx also doesn't consider how this same sort of nationalism manifests itself as racism, disrupting the possibility I'd white-Black worker solidarity and thus thwarting worker solidarity on an international scale.
At the same time, Robinson suggests that some counter revolutionary survives the Middle Passage and embodies itself with peoples of the African Diaspora as a Black radical tradition. While it is problematic that Robinson suggests Black people carry some sort of "African consciousness," it is certainly true that parts of African tradition manifested in the diaspora and continue to influence culture globally. With that in mind, I appreciated how Robinson urges us to think about Black radicals as embodying and shepherding, rather than creating, the Black radical tradition.
Of the three figures he looks at the Wright chapter is the strongest (he seems to like Wright most) and the James chapter the weakest (it strikes me that he just had the least to say about James or perhaps didn't spend as much time researching him). However, one of my strongest critiques of the book is who does not get mentioned, namely any women. I give Robinson the smallest of passes only because I too have struggled to find texts from Black women that engage Black Marxism in a way that say, Black Reconstruction or Black Jacobins do, but at the same time we know there were Black women Marxists that Robinson could/should have known about (Gwendolyn Brooks and Alice Childress, for example).
I think there's space to sort of recreate this project but with less essentialism and more Black feminism, but overall this is a critical contribution to Marxist thought and a must read for anyone interested in Marxism and/or Black radicalism.

[Paul Crider · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is worth reading if you want a Black radical critique of Marxism, a wide-spanning history of rebellious movements in the African diaspora, and a history of how three central Black radical figures evolved out of orthodox Marxism to further the Black radical tradition.

Unfortunately the book was mostly lost on me, as I'm not a Marxist or even Marx-adjacent. That said, the history of race and capitalism in the first part of the book was very informative and engaging. But the history of marronage and rebellion in the African diaspora felt extremely dry. And the central thrust of the book, that orthodox Marxism is not up to the task of dealing with racist ideology as an independent source of oppression is so obvious to me that the weight of pages piling onto this point made reading the latter half of the book feel like a chore.

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really impressive in terms of scope and detail, and really generative--here Robinson asks interesting questions and draws a really important historical through-line. Some of the smaller claims and conclusions I found unconvincing, and certain sections were a bit scattered, but the general thrust of the book is convincing and important to engage with.

[Chuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that this is sort of a masterpiece, even if I disagree with him in many ways. I interviewed him about this book and other topics around a decade ago (it's online) and the dialogue was extremely fun and informative.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a more erudite and less resentful version of Sakai's Settlers. In attempting to create a new total theory of social change for the 20th century, richly patterned with profound engagaments of prior ideologies and movements, Robinson inevitably loses steam at the margins of his analysis. The 'spiritual fabric' of African civilization, which formed the raw material transformed into revolutionary ideology in the New World, is a blank signifier, which the reader learns little about besides its being 'holistic'. Imperialism, neocolonialism and the construction of a postcolonial world order are tacked on to the 'black radical tradition', as if there is a self-evident practical continuity between revolutionary black trade unions in Detroit and Lumumba's national movement. Robinson's historical reckoning, monumental in its own right, in the second half is rerouted towards being the prelude of a new world-historical political wave that is external to much of what was discussed. The modern reader must qualify much of what is predicted in the light of the African future after the debt crisis that did not come to pass.

These faults, however, are the price of analytical ambition, and in its scopeBlack Marxism is hugely stimulating. Especially the long discussion of the evolving position of nationalism within the socialist tradition is something which I'll come back to often.

[Mazen · Rating 5 out of 5]

‏كتاب مهم عن تطور الوعي القومي الأفارقة الذي تم استعبدهم في الأمريكيتين وجزر العالم الجديد مع محاولة لادخال نمط التحليل الماركسي على معاناة هذه الشعوب والأهم من ذلك كيف فشلت الماركسية الغربية في تقديم تحليل ونظريات ثورية تفسر وضع هؤلاء•

[armin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words fail to say what a great book this is and how holistically it grapples with the total erasure of the Black race from the entire historiography of the left. It deals with the foundation of race inside feudalism, how the stigma of race was a crucial diving force in feudalism and how it turned into a color issue as the European exploration of the world found new targets. It then deals with historians that have indeed taken race and color line into consideration; namely Du Bois, James and Wright.
The book is a magnum opus. It is one of those books that divides your life in two: before itself and after itself!

[Simon B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Black Marxism's fine reconstruction of the Black Radical Tradition, which spans centuries of resistance to colonialism, racist oppression and slavery, is reason enough to give it a close read. It also made me want to read more of WEB Du Bois' histories and Richard Wright's novels. Yet Robinson's critiques of Marxism were unoriginal and unpersuasive. His critique often lacks consistency and lapses into caricature. So we read that Marx's idea of successive modes of production is a historicist conceit, but Marxism is also insufficiently historical and unable to account for cultural and ideological survivals of (what Robinson suggests are) European precapitalist ideas such as racism and nationalism. Marxism is wrong to assign the proletariat a uniquely revolutionary role (economistic, reductionist, Eurocentric), but Marxism is also a theory of petty bourgeois intellectuals who were merely for, not of, the working class. In part the critique suffers from an eclectic range of sources: his polemic draws on criticisms of Marx by French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard, cold war liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and Fabian socialist G D R Cole among others. Robinson's portrait of a vulgar, mechanical form of Marxism seems to cause some conceptual problems in his later assessments of Du Bois, Wright and CLR James. Their achievements that Robinson most admires are conceived only as departures from, or exceptions to, their Marxism, which seems hard to sustain. The possible fruitful mutual influence that the two revolutionary traditions have had upon one another, or may have in the future, is undertheorised. Attempts of such a critique today must account for contemporary Marxists such as Angela Davis or Keeanga- Yamahtta Taylor, who are not Eurocentric or class reductionists but are also definitely part of the ongoing development of the Black Radical Tradition.

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Black Marxism is obviously incredible in so many ways. The sheer breadth of its study is astounding. It gives us several crucial arguments still helpful today: the internal character of the emergence of racism to Europe; the torsion by which capitalism reinvigorates feudalism; the rehabilitation of otherwised demonized traditions of African and Black diasporic culture. Robinson rightly takes to task the Marxist tradition for several of its most well known insufficiencies.

But in examining Black Marxists, ultimately, Robinson is outright disingenuous in his assessment. Robinson repeatedly makes the argument that what is the "more powerful influence" in the Black Radical Tradition and its theorists Du Bois, James, and Wright is the presence of the "historical force of the Black movement" (288). On the other hand, the limitations of each of these thinkers is ascribed to their reliance on, or engagement with, the Marxist tradition. But how can one even attempt to disentangle these two sources of inspiration so cleanly, as if they could be understood as lineages that met only at specific points but remained completely segregated?

The insufficiency of this position comes out most clearly in the chapter on CLR James, who Robinson is forced to laud (to a certain degree) to paper over his visceral disdain of James' lifelong (lifelong!) commitment to the grisly inner workings of international socialist organization and thought. From what position can one judge James and his collaborators as merely radical intelligentsia and thus "essentially contemplative didactics" (280)? Robinson further presents James' arguments that enslaved Haitians were "like revolutionary peasants everywhere" and "subject to the same historical laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris" (275) as somehow an anti-marxist argument. No matter the raging worldwide debates on the Agrarian question - everything James did that is worthy, in Robinson's eyes, was and remains decidedly anti-Marxist.

All of this is a buttress for Robinson's sponteneism, something that seems to me to be lost by the assessments of theorists (Robin D.G. Kelley, notably) who are more sympathetic to Black marxists. Robinson is interested in revolt, marronage, voodoo, consciousness, art, music, and religion endemic to what he sees as an unspoiled African tradition. Because he refuses materialist dialectics, Robinson is at pains to show that these cultural traditions were uninfluenced by their surroundings: this is not a theory of hybridity. But in doing so (and in maintaining a principled anti-Leninism), Robinson is forced towards a kind of transcendental ahistoricism on the one hand, and on the other an outright dismissal of "organization" as such. This allows him to totally write off the participation of Du Bois, James, and Wright in communist movements, and to frame them (mostly the first two) as petit bourgeois thinkers. One wonders what we are to make of Robinson's own text, in this regard. As Bedour Alagraa puts it in a review, "What does it mean to offer Black radicalism as a logical outcome of a refusal of Western epistemic framings, including Marxism, when many of the thinkers he invokes never rejected Marxism, but rather, ‘stretched’ Marxism (to borrow from Fanon’s declaration)?"

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book for the simple fact that he wrote this while teaching at Binghamton University, my alma mater! Most people on the outside don't know this, but BU is a hotbed of radical political theory. Marxists who truly understand the full breadth of post-colonial theory accompanied by anarchism and who have actually taken the time to read Capital are a dying breed. There are maybe a half a dozen people in America who could have written a book like this without selling out to some sort of petty "Identity Politics" shenanigans. Ok, maybe a bakers dozen. As a white male the title struck me as something I might not be interested in, but after the first few chapters I realized that this is truly an awe-inspiring work of really wonderful scholarship and cutting edge "critical race theory"... we need more level-headed black intellectuals of the Marxist persuasion in the Western Academy. Too often Marxists are tyrannical misanthropic alienated wage-laborers at the local jerk store. Robinson makes scathing critiques of euro-centric thinking that has over-coded a lot of Marxist ideas, but he does so in a diplomatic way. The intro. by Robin G. Kelly really puts it into perspective; written by someone who was not interested in silly intellectual turf wars, but for people interested in forwarding revolution at a grassroots level. Yes! Factual based analysis from a World Systems Marxist not named Immanuel Wallerstein... that is radical in and of itself.

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I think I would rate higher if I was smarter/had read more of the source material. Robinson is relentlessly thorough, and this is a book I'm going to have to go back through again and again probably to get a real sense of. Nonetheless, I found especially the latter chapters about DuBois, James, and Wright really interesting, and it's made me want to go back and read and reread the works of Wright in particular through a new lens. I'm going to be working through what James means by the Black Radical Tradition for a while, I think because it's deliberately nebulous in a lot of ways, but it was definitely compelling and worth reading!

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some serious flaws in this work—I've written many arguments with Robinson in my copy's margins. But the impact and argument of Black Marxism I feel has been an immensely net positive not only for the development of Marxist theory and historical analysis, but the wider revolutionary movement. It should be read critically, but not dismissed out of hand.

[Graham Cifelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feels so surreal to finally finish this I've been with it for so long! Wild parts were hard to understand and ramble at some points this book has fundamentally changed how I view the world

[molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

can’t wait to read this again when i’m smarter

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Historical sociology. Challenges Marxism’s ethnocentrism, essentialism, and neglect of nationalism & race. Promotes world systems theory and an idealized black radicalism.

[JRT · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Western Marxism, in either of its two variants--critical-humanist or scientific--has proven insufficiently radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of liberation...The Black radical tradition suggests a more complete contradiction."

Cedric Robinson's "Black Marxism" is about the history and centrality of the African struggle against Euro-American domination. In his own words, Robinson seeks to "map the historical and intellectual contours of the encounter between Marxism and Black radicalism, two programs for revolutionary change." Robinson describes in meticulous detail how capitalism developed and expanded on a pre-existing racialized foundation. As such, Robinson argues that European radicalism (i.e. Marxism) is inherently limited by a culture of racialization (including intra-European racialism). Robinson explains that European socialism, like capitalism, is a response to feudal pressures, and feudalism was already filled with the undercurrents of racialization. Thus, Marxism alone is not capable of dismantling what Robinson describes as "racial capitalism."

Robinson--in detailing the expansive history of African rebellion / revolution--argues that Black radicalism is not some variant of Western / European radicalism. Black radicalism is not "Western radicals who happen to be Black." Rather, it is an Afrocentric response to Euro-American domination, with its own tradition and philosophy and history of struggle. Robinson traces the history of racialization (including the European creation of the "Negro"), explaining how racialism both informed and was informed by oppression--in this case, European enslavement of Africans. This of course defies the Marxist assumption that capitalism created racism.

With regard to the Black Radical Tradition, Robinson contends that the 400-500 years of African resistance to domination created a continuity and blueprint for African people that is nationalist in nature. He traces the history of the maroons in various colonies throughout the Americas, and highlights them as proof of an existing radical tradition rooted in nationalism (not Marxism).

This book is like 5 books in one, as it also serves as a mini-biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, CLR James, and Richard Wright, three Black radicals that Robinson traced in order to show how Black radicalism moved in and out of Marxist thought over time. In doing so, Robinson detailed the history and weaknesses of the American communist movement as it related to Black liberation. All in all, this book provides a tremendous account of the history of the African struggle for liberation. While it leaves many questions unanswered (like what economic form should Black nationalist projects take?), it tackles the age old question of the relationship between Marxism and Black liberation, a question that is still highly relevant to the Black Left today.

[Danielle Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valid critique of Marx, but Robinson doesn't offer a strong alternate solution to capitalism.

[Juan Pablo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great doesn't even begin to describe this book. It's a shame it isn't more popular in radical & socialist circles.

It starts off tracing historical roots of racism. It is not unique to the era of European & U.S. Colonialism or Capitalism, but has roots throughout humanity's history of conquest & war. There were always groups of people that were othered. Later came the hierarchy of white "races" used to divide them as well as divide them from "colored races" as better than them. Contends that the impact "The Industrial Revolution", not unlike many stories or legends we are sold, is a bit exaggerated as less attention is typically given to all other factors that allowed it to come to be, i.e. banking, finance, political economy of trade itself & so on.

Early resistance of workers to the impoverishment of their personal lives, of their existence by the I.R. & their attempts for concessions show how the system can & will use your own desires & beliefs against you in order for you to buy their dream & keep the status quo in tact. Again, exemplified by how easy it was for the nationalism of the English working classes to be manipulated to feed into racism that existed before capitalism & was modified & made more virulent to suit the system's own needs. The division between the English & the Irish is a great example of how working class consciousness did not & does not necessarily follow the strict form that it was assumed to follow using French Revolution as an example; there are other factors that influence consciousness.

He traces Marx & Engels ideas towards nationalism, as well as their own, & shows how they & their followers over the years have been reluctant to embrace nationalist sentiments for fear they are always a tool of the state, neglecting how nationalist sentiments have & do inform liberation movements. It can have a role to play for workers because culture can be a means to transmit historical consciousness & to recognition of the right to self-determination. So to dismiss it outright can be a mistake considering its role in many liberation movements that sought to overthrow imperialist & capitalist rule.

Robinson also talks about what is mistaken to be European's first contact with Africans with the appearance of the colonies. He explores the dynamics of racism & slavery & how the destruction of knowledge of our past was used as a means to construct a negative image of Africans, divorcing us from our history & traditions, passing on the same negative characteristics they would give to all whites that weren't of Anglo Saxon descent. They used tactics that they had been using for centuries. He taps into that history, explaining our contact with the Greeks, how they realized their civilization was young & inexperienced, tracing some history of Egypt, Nubia & Kush & their advancements. He shows that there was contact between African civilization & the elites of early European civilization & it is because of it being restricted to elites & their civilizations being cut off & far from early Western European peoples, that after the fall of Rome & the emergence of the church as the leader among Europeans, that most traces of contact with black civilizations were lost. This historical amnesia was key to the dehumanizing that occurred in later contact as previous contact had produced no significantly know color prejudice. So that in tandem with the racializing of non Anglo Saxon Europeans helped produce racism of Western Europe.

While most of western Europeans were still distant, the rest of the world was thriving & slowly via conquest by Eastern people's & trade did western European people come in contact again. Divorced from knowledge of their previous historical contact, with the rise of Christianity as the guide & leader of Europeans & their culture they constructed their own image of themselves & the world which was constantly challenged by the reality of African civilizations, Muslim civilizations & Asian civilizations. Muslim Civilizations were particularly important as with their rise & conquests, unlike their European counterparts would do later, they kept in tact the knowledge & histories of those they came in contact with or conquered. Faced with this reality, as the Church grew in power, so did their use of legends to justify the existence of those in power. These legends in conjunction with the history of dehumanizing outsiders that goes back to the use of the term Barbarian by the Greeks would go on to serve the purpose of elevating themselves in their own eyes & laid the foundation for the racism that came with Transatlantic Slave Trade. This allowed them to construct reality to see themselves & the world regardless of facts that contradicted them.

This takes us to the Transatlantic Slave Trade & it passing through the hands of the Spanish, the Dutch, to the Netherlands & later to be ruled by Britain. It is through the combination of the historical roots of European racism, it's losing knowledge of previous historical contact, later re-introduction to Africans, the emergence of mercantile capitalism & it's transformation into industrial capitalism & it's need for "free" & cheap labor that lays the foundation for black radical traditions. He ties them all together to demonstrate the historical conditions that inform our liberation movements & make them distinct from what Marxism typically assumes to be working-class movements that would spring forth because of capitalism due to its Eurocentric influences. How could they not be different? As Marxism tends to hold that historical conditions inform the movements, seeing as how the histories of labor for Europeans & Africans are similar but not even close to identical, the history given shows where missteps have occurred on assessing & recognizing how black liberation movements came to be & function.

He shows us that uprisings & rebellions were constant despite the best efforts to keep them obscured. Rebellious acts weren't just uprisings either, they were acts of sabotaging tools, work slow-downs, intentionally not reproducing  & any other imaginative way to frustrate the slave masters & their system. Denying this was by design. The powers that be would take note, send out people to make record of events & distort the details as they saw fit depending on their needs at the time. Locals of course would write as well & do the same, even if only out of spite for their notions of superiority being contradicted by the reality of the actions of black people. The fact that most of the slaves, whether they be in North America, South America or any islands that had slave colonies were actually recently brought from Africa played a significant role in these uprisings & rebellions. They brought their traditions, their culture & thus their memories, they saw themselves not at all as slaves & that is what informs the radical traditions as opposed to what is considered to be the "universal" view of that of the working class or an under-class. Robinson makes it evident that African people have always defined themselves & their realities, something that most people miss.

The tradition & beliefs of W.E.B. Du Bois
 & their evolution through his life are traced as well as early black nationalist movements & their interactions with Socialist & Communist elements are given attention. A good chunk of the focus is on the failure of their interactions or why some never came to be, mainly due to lack of understanding of the traditions & history that informed black radicals & how working class whites were averse to blacks in general & how they became pawns for northern industrialists for racism to keep them divided. That, in tandem with the fact that despite their best efforts & desire to incorporate black people into the movement, the Soviet Union's lack of historical perspective for black people's experience led to a failure to manifest what could have been a crucial unification.

Next, he gives some history of C.L.R. James, his experiences & how they transformed him. He was raised to be part of the upper class & had shunned politics, especially those involving black people, but his racial identity & events of the world forced him to contend with this & get involved. Robinson also shows how James traced the bourgeoisies' appropriation of sports, which often come about as a means of building comradery amongst "lower" classes, specifically using the example of cricket, as a way to justify their rule. The appropriation springs forth its own ideology & justification that serves the status quo of the state & makes the "upper" classes appear more cultured & therefore better. Certainly, not the first to do this, it is a practice that goes back to earlier civilizations & is a practice that continues today.

Lastly, he juxtaposes the progression of Richard Wright's views with how they are portrayed in his popular works, what it meant for Wright himself, his contemporary audience & the audience of later generations. Wright saw clearly the limitations of Marxism for dealimg with the racial experiences of blacks. For him, Marxism was useful, especially for the rise of radicals of all oppressed groups, but only the beginning. He was able to display the experiences of black people not of the bourgeoisie, that are pertinent for organization & change. "At the moment when a people begin to realize a meaning in their suffering, the civilization that engenders that suffering is doomed."

It isn't just the conditions created by
capitalism that inform the lives & any social eruptions that may spring forth, but also their beliefs, mores & morals, that usually stem from previous beliefs. All of these, these cultures, because of any breaks brought about via exploitation, colonialism & imperialism, survive & develop in defiance of that oppression. It has been so with any oppressed group as historically, with or without contact with Marxist thought, they have most often been able to push Marxism further than most western European radicals as their existence & experience show a unique contradiction with the system that spares them most illusions of assimilation. This is the important distinction that most Marxists miss: For Europeans it has been their immediate exposure to capitalism & it's exploitation that has created their radicalism. For Africans it has been that via slavery, colonialism & imperialism PLUS our struggles to keep our cultures in tact however we can & develop our own whereever we are displaced, all in defiance, that creates our black radical traditions.

"One does not need education or encouragement to cherish a dream of freedom."

Best book I've read in a while! Truly a gem!

[Basil · Rating 5 out of 5]

feeling really grateful to have been a student of this book for the past month. it's raised so many questions for me about where to place Marxist theory, history, and historiography in the search for a broader collective liberation that goes beyond European imaginaries, and it doesn't settle for any simplistic answers. its treatment of the Black radical tradition prompts further questions about syncretic Marxist traditions from the peripheries of colonial violence: their interventions, and their blindsides. i'm excited to think about this read for a while, both as a narration of Black counter-histories, and as a complex excursion into WEB Du Bois, CLR James, and Richard Wright.

[Fran Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a challenging read! Super interesting and I think reading CLR James and Hobsbawm previously aided my understanding of it. I think it was a pretty Trotskyist book but was interesting in showing a wide range of thoughts and both the similarities and differences of thought within the Black Radical Tradition.

[Callie]

idk how I feel about rating theory, especially theory that is So Long, but hey. I read this.