Author | Cedric Robinson |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Zed Books |
Publication date | 1983 |
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, first published in 1983, again in 2000 and a third edition in 2020, is a book written by the scholar Cedric Robinson. Influenced by many African-American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved. [1] The book does not build from nor reiterate Marxist thought, but rather introduces racial analysis to the Marxist tradition.
Black Marxism is separated into three parts, the first being, “The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism;” the second, “The Roots of Black Radicalism;” and the third, “Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory.” Through these sections, Robinson critiques Marxism and its reliance on determinism. The primary theories which result from Black Marxism are racial capitalism and the Black radical tradition.
The book begins by introducing the theory of racial capitalism, the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person. [2] Robinson develops this term to correct what he thinks led Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to mistakenly believe that European bourgeois society would rationalize social relations. [3] Robinson says that “As a material force… racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer ... to the subsequent structure as a historical agency.” [4] He argues that all capitalism is structured by ‘racialism’ and produces inequalities among groups. [5] Thus, all capitalism should be recognized as racial capitalism.
In addition to theorizing on racial capitalism, Black Marxism aims to elucidate the Black radical tradition of the past, present, and future. Robinson recounts several acts of resistance, from seventeenth-century maroon communities in the Americas to twentieth-century national liberation struggles, looking to scholars W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James to exemplify the tradition. [6] [3]
Black Marxism was first published in 1983 by Zed Books. It was republished in 2000 by the University of North Carolina Press, with an introduction provided by Robin D. G. Kelley. Black Marxism’s second edition received both praise and criticism from within the American political left. [4] A third edition was published in 2020, again by University of North Carolina Press with a new preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley. [7]
Several writers have demonstrated and written about Black Marxism's relevance for 21st-century issues.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement grounds its structural analysis of Black oppression in racial capitalism. Specifically, the organization Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) names racial capitalism in its 2020 policy platform, "A Vision for Black Lives". [5] Scholars find it noteworthy that BLM continues to reach back to Black Marxism, suggesting that the book's theories have great significance for black radical movements of the past and present. Moreover, contemporary radical scholars champion Black Marxism for the extent to which it argues the link between contemporary anti-Black violence and historical structures of oppression. [5] [8]
The publication of Black Marxism has directed the agenda of Africana studies, as well as influenced the definition of radicalism in Black scholarship. [9] [10] The Black radical tradition provides a rich resource for future challenges of Africana studies and it acts as a bridge, helping academics to “understand the conceptual vocabulary used by ... activist-intellectuals who research and teach about the relationship between race and class … [and] to identify the concepts needed to transform the conditions under which the radical tradition now operates." [10]
Marxist film theory is an approach to film theory centered on concepts that make a political understanding of the medium possible.
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations.
Materialist feminism is a theoretical current of radical feminism that was formed around the French magazine Questions féministes. It is characterized by the use of conceptual tools from Marxism—notably historical materialism—to theorize patriarchy and its abolition.
Critical management studies (CMS) is a loose but extensive grouping of theoretically informed critiques of management, business and organisation, grounded originally in a critical theory perspective. Today it encompasses a wide range of perspectives that are critical of traditional theories of management and the business schools that generate these theories.
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates with the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
Harry Haywood was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.
The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was an important force for liberalism and later radicalism in South African student anti-apartheid politics. Its mottos included non-racialism and non-sexism.
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Communism is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.
Cedric James Robinson was an American professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science. He served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, racial capitalism, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
Neo-Marxism is a collection of Marxist schools of thought originating from 20th-century approaches to amend or extend Marxism and Marxist theory, typically by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions such as critical theory, psychoanalysis, or existentialism. Neo-Marxism comes under the broader framework of the New Left. In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to Marxist philosophy.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence the orthodoxy of Vladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. It overlaps significantly with Instrumental Marxism.
Barbara Clare Foley is an American writer and the Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She focuses her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist criticism. The author of six books and over seventy scholarly articles, review essays, and book chapters, she has published on literary theory, academic politics, US proletarian literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the writers Ralph Ellison and Jean Toomer. Throughout her career, her work has emphasized the centrality of antiracism and Marxist class analysis to both literary study and social movements.
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Anarchism and libertarianism, as broad political ideologies with manifold historical and contemporary meanings, have contested definitions. Their adherents have a pluralistic and overlapping tradition that makes precise definition of the political ideology difficult or impossible, compounded by a lack of common features, differing priorities of subgroups, lack of academic acceptance, and contentious historical usage.
Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from Black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value."
The Black radical tradition is a philosophical tradition and political ideology with roots in 20th century North America. It is a "collection of cultural, intellectual, action-oriented labor aimed at disrupting social, political, economic, and cultural norms originating in anti-colonial and antislavery efforts." It was first popularised by Cedric Robinson's book Black Marxism.