In October 2022 we published in The Philosophical Salon a critique of Cedric Robinson’s landmark study, Black Marxism.[1] We took objection to Robinson’s claim that Marxism is a European ideology that is blind to racialism and that the epistemology of historical materialism, along with the political premium it places on proletarian struggle, does not apply to Africans and other non-European peoples. We critiqued his conception of an undifferentiated category of oppressed humanity defined by ahistoric essentialized identities, illustrated by his insistence that Africans and Europeans are endowed with distinct metaphysical essences. These conceptions, we argued, are a hallmark of the identitarian paradigm that posits some shared interest of a group of people made organic by an essential ascribed identity, generally racial or ethnic. This paradigm has come to eclipse the language of class, contraposing class to ethnic, cultural, or national identity. We argued that Black Marxism epitomizes the retreat of the left intelligentsia into the academy, where it has abandoned the commitment to a universal emancipatory project and has instead turned to celebrating the fragmented particularisms postulated by post-narratives, for which the causal explanation of racism is not to be found in the political-economic critique of capitalism but in psychology and culture. We concluded that the appeal of Black Marxism in academia must be placed in the historical moment of its publication in the 1980s, namely the worldwide defeat of proletarian forces and revolutionary struggles of the preceding two decades and capital’s globalizing and neoliberal offensive.
Our essay was widely read internationally. It generated considerable controversy and much needed debate. Among those who objected to our critique was Chris McAuley, a professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) who has been teaching the Black Marxism seminar since Cedric Robinson – himself a professor at UCSB – passed away in 2015. McAuley wrote a lengthy letter to us to which we replied with a letter of counter-critique. The exchange addressed matters of interpretation on substantive historical and theoretical issues raised by Black Marxism and by our 2022 essay. McAuley published his letter to us in spring 2024 in the journal Kalfou.[2] In it he reiterated Robinson’s charge that Marx was unable to account for black slavery, which he says was only significant for Marx with regard to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. According to McAuley, Marx saw the labor of black people, of unfree labor, as “outside” of capitalism. McAuley insisted in his letter that Marx “removed black people from the capitalist world system” whereas Robinson sought to place them back in it. He argued that Robinson sought to explore “whether racial logic preceded the development of capitalism” and “what impact racial reasoning may have had on Karl Marx himself and on later Marxist thinkers.” McAuley also claimed that “common people” in Europe have long subscribed to this racial logic in a “class-crossing and trans-epochal” sort of “blue blood” solidarity. McAuley (and presumable Robinson) insisted that slave revolts, including the Haitian revolution, were anti-capitalist rebellions. What follows is our letter of counter-critique which we sent to Professor McAuley in 2023.
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Dear Chris,
Thank you for your critique of our article, “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique” (henceforth, The Cult). We have had a chance to read and discuss it amongst ourselves. We appreciate that you took the time to read our essay and to reply in detail. Let us reply in kind, and in a spirit of fraternal debate.
We find your approach characteristic of followers of Cedric Robinson who wish to salvage the work by engaging in an extremely charitable interpretation of Black Marxism (henceforth, BM) with such phrases as, in your words, “As I understand Robinson’s thinking”, “However, as I read Robinson”, “I believe that Robinson was trying to reflect”, and so on. Such phrases in our view point to an intent to repurpose Robinson’s arguments to say something that, at best, the author failed to state clearly and did not substantiate, and worse, did not actually intend to say. Ironically, this same charitable interpretation is never extended to Marx himself, or to Marxists for that matter. In perusing your commentary, we find it riddled with inconsistencies, only some of which we can reference here, and in any event, we find that a good portion of your argument is already addressed and contested in our original essay. We believe you did not engage with the inner core of our critique of BM, namely:
- Robinson’s unambiguous claim that historical materialism is a Western construct that does not apply to African peoples, along with his mythical reading of the African past (and absurd claim that Africans are averse to violence);
- his notion of essentialized and undifferentiated meta ethnonations (Europeans and Africans) each with their distinct epistemologies and psyches that render “African” and “European” as disembodied categories;
- the claim – demonstratably false – that Marxists have been unable to explain racial inequality, that the “Black Radical Tradition” is incommensurable with Marxism.
- You brush over Robinson’s claim that European “racialism” can be traced back to antiquity and in his construct appears as transhistoric;
- You are silent on the implications for transnational proletarian struggle of Robinson’s assertion that racialism is so deeply etched into the psyche of Europeans that they are “unprepared for anything else.”
- You suggest that Robinson wants us to “appreciate how Marxists of African descent have sought to challenge and broaden Marxist analysis particularly on matters of race and empire.” But Robinson has already claimed that Marxism does not apply to African peoples, so that by his logic, these Marxists of African descent must necessarily be on the wrong track.
There is in our view no way to square the circle on these overarching matters. But let us put them aside and get to the key points of your argument. We are not clear on what you wish to say by asking “what impact racial reasoning may have had on Marx.” What do you mean by racial reasoning and how “may have” Marx engaged in it? It seems to us that Robinson’s notion of Africans and Europeans as essentialzed racial categories that are epistemologically antagonistic and inhabit distinct transhistoric psyches is the epitome of “racial reasoning.” Judging by your commentary one may conclude that the main point of disagreement between the authors of The Cult and of BM is whether the modern form of capitalism that characterized the Americas should be considered “capitalist.” You marshal more than half of your arguments in reply to this debate event though that wasn’t an argument advanced in The Cult. Instead, the argument we advanced was that the racialization of slavery and the production of “race” into which different segments of humanity were assigned is a modern phenomenon that arose only within the context of capitalism. To that extent we discussed pre-capitalist, non-racialized modes of slavery, including those internal to African societies.
But here you find it “difficult to fault Robinson for not having included in his study aims that were not his own, such as making it a comparative one.” We find this contention untenable because Robinson is asserting that there was something special or particular about “racialism” in Europe on the basis of which flows the whole crux of his argument. Therefore, Robinson’s study is already comparative. His claim cannot be validated outside of a comparative discussion: it is otherwise meaningless because something is special or particular only in relation to something else.
Moreover, you did not address what we observed in The Cult: if Robinson accepts that “racialism” existed elsewhere as well, and if ruling groups everywhere profited from existing social distinctions then why did this lead Europe and not others located elsewhere to conquer the world and to establish European supremacy? Our answer was unambiguous: capitalism. Robinson has no answer. Your recourse to an extended reference to Verlinden’s study, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization,[3] does not resolve the antinomy. Verlinden’s study discusses slavery in Europe prior to the capitalist era. Verlinder does not address the matter we insisted on in The Cult: slavery in Europe prior to capitalism paralleled and resembled slavery elsewhere around the world in the same historical period and stood at the margins of the feudal mode of production. There was nothing particularly “European” to this slavery as distinct from capitalist slavery that would come later.
In any event, Robinson must have been aware, and you must be as well, that slavery in Europe prior to capitalism was decidedly not “racial,” as we already noted in The Cult. You mention slave labor used on sugar plantations in the Mediterranean. Surely you are aware that these sugar plantations put to work “white” slaves as much as slaves drawn from Africa and the Muslim realms. Any attempt to equate “race,” which is an ideology applied to suit ruling class motives and interests, with an historical category ends up emptying history and elevating ideology to the status of an explanatory factor.
You state that Robinson’s thinking is “guided by a dialectical logic which maintains that any practice or system that exists in a given present has historical antecedents that bear some resemblance to it.” However, the same dialectical logic must hold that any practice or system has a genesis. You cannot claim any dialectical logic without identifying both historical genesis and rupture or transformation that is at the heart of dialectical logic. Robinson does not identify any genesis of “racialism” as “an elemental feature of European civilization”. He simply asserts with no historical evidence that this racialism goes back millennia. But we need to pause here and interrogate what you are arguing. Practices and systems in the present have historical antecedents. European racialism exists in the presence. Ergo it must have existed in the past. By this logic, the alleged racialist practices of ancient Greek society must too have had historical antecedents. And those antecedents must have in turn had their own antecedents. This logic ineluctably takes us back to the origin of our species. Ergo, racialism is intrinsic to our very species. Such an argument has no explanatory power; it gets us nowhere.
We believe that your perspective is not dialectical but rather antagonistic to dialectical logic, which we find absent in your comments. It seems to us that you and Robinson see categories as static and essential rather than in a constant state of process and transformation. One way to observe this failure in practice is that you both begin with the categories that you supposedly set out to analyze. You describe one of Robinson’s goals as to “inscribe Black labor, particularly enslaved, but also peasant labor into the capitalist world economy” (our emphasis). When historically – under what historical circumstances – did labor become “Black labor”? You and Robinson presuppose the creation of the category; you presuppose what needs to be explained. As we know from the historical record, the material (class) relations of slavery preceded the development of the ideological concepts of blackness and whiteness.
It is this failure to think dialectically that prevents Robinson from understanding that the presence of inequality, hierarchy and even xenophobia does not mean that racism (or his preferred term racialism) is present in pre-capitalist societies, whether they practiced slavery or not. As we know, significant social inequality dates back to the rise of state/class societies about seven to eight millennia ago. Along with these differences in status there emerges too the need for ruling classes to justify or naturalize (quite literally in the sense of attributing to nature what is human-created) distinct statuses. Social inequality and class domination precedes capitalism by millennia, as do ideologies that rationalize their existence. However, it is a grave error, only made possible through anti-dialectical thinking, as noted above, to see these as instances of racism. To do so is to simply reduce all instances of inequality and domination to racism and thus to render the concept meaningless for the analysis of “race” and racism within capitalism.
Robinson’s second guiding principle, you say, derives from the “’legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the ‘racial’ components of its elements’ [here you close the quotation] in European history, is that common people no less than elites subscribe to racialism’s logic.” In the first place, you have not resolved anything from this quotation. It is a non-reply to our observation that all social inequality is legitimated by claims of natural difference between the rulers and the ruled and that Robinson never once defines “racialism” beyond this. For this reason, in Robinson’s construct racialism becomes synonymous with all historical legitimations of ruling class domination – so general and so universal as to render invalid any meaningful statement or analysis of Europe, and for that matter, of racism in the modern capitalist world. We reiterate what we pointed out in The Cult. “Racialism” loses all meaning in the absence of any specificity apart from the legitimation of inequality by naturalizing ideological categories that are created by ruling groups in function of their control and exploitation.
Second, neither you nor Robinson provide any evidence whatsoever of what “common people” in precapitalist Europe thought and subscribed to, much less any evidence that they subscribed to “racialism’s logic.” Were we to presuppose anything in this vein, it would be that the exploited classes everywhere internalize the ideas, ideology and worldview of the dominant classes. But this is beside the point: we are astonished by your comment that on the basis of some “diffusionist principle from ‘blue blood’ elites to the masses…. that racial or ethnic hierarchies [are] class-crossing and trans-epochal.” Are you asking us to accept that because “common people” in the pre-capitalist era believed in an undefined “racialism” that therefore they became organized into and located advantageously in real historical material or social hierarchies? Absent any evidence whatsoever that there were “common people” organized advantageously into “racial” hierarchies from antiquity and through feudalism, this claim appears as ideational, part of a larger system of historical idealism, a fantastic argument yet one necessary to legitimate BM’s claims.
Let us step away from Robinson’s and your trans-historic or “trans-epochal” claims given that they are entirely unsubstantiated, and focus on racialist stratification among the laboring masses in the capitalist era. In one place you observe that labor histories shows that relatively privileged workers as determined by ethnicity are perfectly capable of discriminating against other workers whom they consider outside their group. Elsewhere you expand on a “wages of whiteness” argument,[4] according to which white proletarians have a material interest in racial oppression. It is one thing to observe that white proletarians internalize racist attitudes and beliefs. That is exactly how hegemony functions: ruling ideas and ideologies are internalized by the subaltern. In this regard, we believe you ignore the incredible lengths the capitalist state was willing to go to legislate against white and black toilers fraternizing, cohabiting, and otherwise mixing socially. That is, the capitalist state has always been an active agent evoking state power to prevent any cross-racial working-class solidarity and to instill racialist thinking among the white members of the laboring masses.
It is quite another matter to claim that racism is in the material interests of white proletarians, or that they have had the social power to translate their beliefs into material advantage. It was Marxists – specifically Engels and Lenin – who came up with the theory of the labor aristocracy, whereby sectors of the working class enjoyed some material advantage due to their privileged location in the global capitalist order. Marxists have long since noted that the distribution of these privileges may be racially organized, most blatantly in apartheid South Africa, to take but the most extreme case. However, the matter should not be overstated and generalized. You point out that capitalist slavery sought to work and abuse slaves to death. That is correct. And it an equally correct description for white workers in England and elsewhere at the same historical moment that slaves were worked and abused to death. Here is Marx in Capital quoting an English magistrate’s report in 1860:
Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate….The system is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally and spiritually. What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition that the period of labor for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours a day? We declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their black-market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of the capitalists?[5]
We don’t know if these workers that the magistrate describes held racialist beliefs or believed in the myth of “blue blood.” But we do know that these conditions were the norm and not the exception for the great sweep of world capitalist history, existing in a world outside your claim that “racial or ethnic hierarchies [are] class-crossing and trans-epochal” …. Or rather, your claim stands outside the real history of world capitalism. What were conditions for the majority of Southern whites under slavery? As the eminent historian of poor whites in the Antebellum South, Avery Craven, has shown, slave ownership was far beyond the economic reach of even most landowning whites:
Whites lived in one-room shacks made of logs and mud, normally without windows. They had difficulty traveling from place to place, often in carts pulled by dogs. Without shoes, hookworm was a constant concern, and starvation was a threat. Not having enough to eat was a constant worry for a sizable percentage of the white population. Merritt writes, citing one slave who said, ‘we had more to eat than them’. Of their white neighbors, the slave noted, ‘they were sorry folk’. Merritt cites historian Avery Craven, who ’identified several similarities between the material lives of poor whites and slaves. Their cabins differed little in size and comfort, as both were constructed from chinked logs and generally had only one room. Furthermore, these two underclasses dressed in homespuns and went barefoot in season. The women of both classes toiled in the fields or carried the burden of other manual labor and the children of both early reached the age of industrial accountability. Even the food they prepared and ate, she concluded, was strikingly similar.[6]
It is nothing new, and nor does it in any way validate Robinson’s or your thesis, to observe that whites had it better than blacks in the past history of world capitalism, and that by and large black proletarians have it worse now than white proletarians (although that too is changing in the neoliberal era). But if there was any “cross-class” alliance here between the slave aristocracy and the poor whites it was decidedly not in the material interests of the poor whites and there was clearly no objective advantage to subscribing to racist beliefs. To the contrary, objectively it was and still is to the disadvantage of white and black workers alike. At the same time, no ruling class has ever privileged its “race” by giving the workers of its “race” shelter from exploitation.
It should be clear at this point that “racialism” cannot be separated from capitalism. Let us then return to the matter of capitalism and capitalist slavery. Your own fixation on this point takes up the great bulk of your comments and is to some degree understandable, as Robinson makes the same strawman argument against Marx in BM, apparently to demonstrate that Marx did not know how to deal with non-white and non-proletarian populations and particularly black people. As Meyerson explains on this regard: “slaves are, says Robinson presumably paraphrasing Marx, an ‘embarrassing residue’ of an old mode of production, ‘which disqualified them from historical agency . . . in the modern world.’ The language used by Robinson here to describe Marxism is illustrative of his larger effort to ‘show how Marxism is violent and exclusionary’.”[7]
You suggest that Marx insists that only wage labor produces capital, that therefore “capitalist slavery is a contradiction in terms,” and that hence Marx/Marxists cannot fit slavery into the logic of capitalism. Your claim is misleading on numerous counts. Let us put aside that Marx made crystal clear how colonialism, conquest, slavery and so on, were integral parts of the development and expansion of the world capitalist system, that slavery laid the basis for capitalist development and industrialization. Robinson himself cites Marx discussing the centrality of black slavery for world capitalism: “Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industrialism today as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery no cotton; without cotton no modern industry. Slavery has given value to the colonies; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry …. Slavery is therefore an economic category of the highest importance.”[8] On this basis alone we can disregard the claim that Marx could not account for slavery. In doing so, we can also disregard your claim that Marx/Marxists placed the labor of blacks “outside of capitalism.” Let us also put aside that Marx showed over and again that capital was very adept at mobilizing, procuring, and employing different forms of labor to pump surplus labor from toiling populations. He did not introduce any inside-outside dichotomy between wage labor and non-waged labor. He did not adopt or employ any linear idea of capitalism resting exclusively on free wage labor.
But it is not about grabbing as many quotes of Marx as possible to legitimate either your claim or ours. The crux is that your claim is not historical. What accounted for the demise of slavery and the conversion of the former slaves into proletarians? Precisely, the transition from a 300-year epoch of mercantile capitalism, in which slavery played a central role in the development of world capitalism, to that of industrial capitalism in which the use of enslaved over wage labor became a cog to the worldwide circuits of capital accumulation. We note your incorrect claim that Marxists are concerned with slavery in the transition from feudalism to capitalism; the concern is the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism and a more complete development of the value form. We need go no further than one famous passage from Eric William’s study: “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly. But in so doing it helped to create the industrial capitalism of the late nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed the power of commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works. Without a grasp of economic changes the history of the period is meaningless.”[9]
Mercantile capital facilitates the movement of commodities autonomous from the relations of production that produce these commodities (exchange values). As capitalism further developed – that is, as we moved to a more complete development of the value form – it penetrated and took over the actual production of commodities (you conflate exchange value with capital, but we won’t get into that here). This is a history told innumerably by Marxists, including Marxists from throughout the former Third World. In their book Essays on the Political Economy of Africa,[10] Giovanni Arrighi and John Saul show how capital as it developed proletarianized the Rhodesian peasantry yet also how it incorporated into its circuit non-capitalist production relations at the village level. More sweepingly, the well-established Marxist concept of a social formation is concerned with how other relations of production (slave, peasant, household) have always been articulated into capitalism and how that articulation is an essential element of capitalist reproduction.
Your comment that DuBois, James, and others attempt to apply Marxist tools to the black experience in slavery and in winning freedom (which “demonstrated to Robinson that both thinkers had to go outside of then acceptable Marxism to do so”) is a strawman. DuBois and James were Marxists who applied Marxism to concrete historical matters in order to reveal unexposed racial or other elements or to reinterpret a Marxist analysis of history. In sharp contrast, Robinson is rejecting a Marxist analysis of history as not applicable to African peoples. We find nothing in the works of black Marxists, from Dubois and James, to Rodney, Cabral, and so on, that is a rejection of Marxism. These Marxists stand on the opposite side of Robinson. Robinson did not argue that Marxism and historical materialism are vital tools for analyzing the black experience in slavery and winning freedom. To the contrary, he insisted that Marxism and historical materialism are incommensurate with his construct. This is another circle that cannot be squared. There is no rescuing BM by recourse to the black Marxists.
Near the end of your commentary, you state that slave revolts, the Haitian revolution, and anti-racist rebellions were anti-capitalist rebellions. This is a bold statement that we believe misreads history. The newly liberated slaves of Santo Domingo fought against enslavement, not necessarily against capitalism. The newly freed wanted to become independent small-scale producers and were quite surprised that Toussaint L’Ouverture and his colleagues demanded that they return to the plantations as wage laborers. The Haitian revolution and other such epochal struggles were world-historic events that we analyze, commemorate, and take inspiration from to this day. But anti-slavery and anti-oppression did not equate to anti-capitalism, no more than anti-imperialism necessarily equates to anti-capitalism, a fact that is borne out by the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggles in the Caribbean and elsewhere, as Williams and many others have discussed.[11]
A couple of concluding observations. First, near the end of your commentary you return to the assertion that “white skins were protection against enslavement,” and again we are left asking if you are not aware that whites were enslaved in the United States and in the Caribbean. Only later in the late 17th and into the 18th century did the ruling groups create and normalize blackness and whiteness and turn slavery specifically and exclusively into the slavery of black people. By systematically ignoring this historical fact, Robinson and you are able to claim that racialism is something ingrained in the European psyche for millennia rather than a creation of the European ruling classes born out of capitalism and in response to the imperative of capitalist exploitation and control. And finally, you say we contend “that Marxism is always inclusive.” However, nowhere did we contend this. We quite explicitly stated that European Marxists have been Eurocentric and racist. Here is what we wrote:
[Robinson] conflates Marxism as an epistemology and ontology of human society with how it was applied and practiced in its particular history by Marxists or in the name of Marxism. If the fundamental premises of historical materialism and human universals have appeared in Marxism as dogmatic or Eurocentric, let us fault the Marxists who applied them in their intellectual and political practices. European Marxists may have been Eurocentric. They may have exhibited a blind spot to racism or suppressed the struggle against it in the name of class struggle. Indeed, they may even have been racist and chauvinistic. But none of this invalidates the fundamental tenets of Marxism. Indeed, Marxists have been at the forefront of critiquing Eurocentrism. It is not clear how the Eurocentrism or the racial chauvinism of Europeans who considered themselves Marxists invalidates historical materialism that, along with the dialectical approach, forms the epistemological core of Marxism that Robinson claims is incommensurate with the struggles of African peoples.Regards,
William, Salvador, and Hilbourne
Notes:
[1] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000[1983]); William I. Robinson, Salvador Rangel, and Hilbourne Watson, “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique,” The Philosophical Salon, 3 October 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cult-of-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism-a-proletarian-critique/
[2] Chris McAuley, “Contesting ‘The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism”,” Kalfou, 11(1), Spring 2024
[3] Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1970).
[4] David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2022, 4th edition).
[5] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967[1867]), pp. 233-234.
[6] As cited in David North and Thomas Mackaman, The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2021), pp. 128, and for more detail on the condition of poor whites in the Antebellum South, see Eric London, “Book Review: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt,” World Socialist Website, 9 September 2019, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/09/mast-s09.html
[7] Gregory Meyerson, “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,” Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice, Vol. 6, 2000, available at https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/192628/189186
[8] Robinson, Black Marxism, pp. 81.
[9] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966[1946]). In Capital, Vol. II (New York” International Publishers, 1967[1893]), pp. 113-14, Marx notes that “to replace [pre- and non-capitalist modes of production] they must be reproduced, and to this extent the capitalist mode of production is conditional on modes of production lying outside of its own stage of development. But it is the tendency of the capitalist mode of production to transform all production as much as possible into commodity production. The mainspring by which this is accomplished is precisely the involvement of all production into the capitalist circulation process.”
[10] Giovanni Arrighi and John S. Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973).
[11] Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
