Interests are the basis of political life. Put another way, politics is the process through which discrete interests are articulated, organized, and imposed through institutions, policies, cultural hegemony, coercion, force, or some combination of those elements. Here I do not merely mean interests in the pedestrian sense of what concerns us but in the deeper, early modernist sense of passions—what preoccupies us and motivates us, what determines our immediate actions and shifting priorities in real historical time. In the latter sense, we can distinguish mere hobbies and idiosyncratic preferences from deeper political and social commitments, those activities and ideas that inform daily life and, in certain moments, that compel us to transform the terms of everyday life by amassing social power through alliance with others; donations of time, money, and resources; acts of solidarity; sabotage; strikes; occupation; activist campaigns; party formation; voting; lobbying; social movements; protests; rebellion; and war. Political interests are essentially what particular constituencies want both in an immediate sense of metabolic needs, political rights, social relations, resources, and other conditions of life and the conscious ideological sense, what kind of world those constituents want. The fact of social heterogeneity, diverse passions, rivalries, and conflicting interests is a fundamental condition of our species and the plane where politics begins, from the formation of the earliest clans and nomadic tribes, the classical civilizations of antiquity, the kingdoms and empires of the “long Middle Ages,” to the making of the modern world and the large complex capitalist societies of our time. Throughout all of human history, the question of power, who will rule, who will be ruled, and on what terms—or more succinctly, class struggle—is always present, central, and contingent.

Conjunctural analysis is the study of historically specific interests in motion, the actual shape and character of political conflicts in real time and space. Conjuncture is, as Louis Althusser described it, “[t]he central concept of the Marxist science of politics.”1 Moreover, coming to terms with historical conjuncture entails describing “the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied.”2 In this way, the notion of conjuncture, with its focus on historically discrete interests, unites historical interpretation and political practice across the wide-ranging and diverse body of writings, social movements, parties, and interpretative tendencies that might be described as Marxist. The potential power of any political campaign, state intervention, or social struggle is determined in part by how well or poorly their devotees understand their times and what they are up against. Antonio Gramsci’s injunction that we turn our faces “violently towards things as they exist now” might be the most succinct statement of what conjunctural analysis entails.3 In this consistent practice of wrestling with given historical conditions, we might avoid presentism, which Theodore Allen once defined as “the assignment of motivations for behavior to suit current vogues without proof that those motivations actually figured into the needs and feelings of the people of the historic period under consideration.”4 An emphasis on both the longue durée, i.e., the slower-moving and seemingly more permanent structures of domination and economic systems, and the conjunctural-political aspects of history together should serve as a strong tonic against the tendency to see working-class unity as either an historical given due to a common condition of exploitation or an impossibility due to the reactionary politics and power alignments defining any given historical moment.

The study of conjuncture unites and defines the evolving materialist conception of history from the dire conditions a twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Engels reported from working-class Manchester, the high historical drama captured in the pages of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, down through Gramsci’s discussion of the wars of position and maneuver in his prison notebooks. Conjunctural analyses have deepened our understanding of working-class life and culture from the detailed historiographies of urban industrial working-class life pioneered by E.P. Thompson to the many accounts of slave rebellions and life beyond the overseer’s gaze advanced by C.L.R. James, George Rawick, Herbert Gutman, and generations of left historians since.5 Closer to our own times, the same quality of analysis unites accounts of black political life and the problematic of racecraft in American society offered by Touré F. Reed, Dean Robinson, Kenneth Warren, Michelle Boyd, John Arena, Preston Smith, Karen Fields, Barbara J. Fields, Adolph Reed, Jr., Walter Benn Michaels, Michael Rudolph West, and Judith Stein, among so many others.6

All these authors are anti-capitalist in analytical commitments and political faith, and all provide a keen sense of political and social conflicts and the shifting character of social struggles—the real forces at play in different historical and regional contexts. In the works of these and other authors, the working class is a class in itself given the social relations necessitated by capital accumulation, but none assume that the laboring classes are always already a unified political force, a class for itself.

Despite the title, the late political scientist Cedric J. Robinson’s 1983 book Black Marxism is a screed against Marx’s materialist conception of history and a criticism of those black Marxists who neglected the “black radical tradition,” a history of diasporic revolt Robinson saw as irreducible to proletarian struggles. The book is serious, ambitious, thoughtful, and iconoclastic but, as I will argue here, mostly mistaken about Marx, Engels, and historical materialism and the origins of racism and its relative historical power. Robinson’s prose evokes the longue durée, an approach shared by his colleagues at State University of New York at Binghamton where he began work on Black Marxism. Racial capitalism, as Robinson develops the notion, however, is the wrong durée, an ahistorical grand narrative that treats race as a metaphysical and all-powerful motive force across millennia. This understanding of history can only cohere and make sense if we suspend keen analysis of real historical interests and, worse, if we engage in biological essentialism, where racist assumptions about ancestry, identity, human capacity, communion, power, and politics are accepted as given, natural, and immutable with little regard for the actual socio-historical forces at play.

Robinson rejected the prevailing critical anti-capitalist perspective regarding the origins of racist ideology—that is, that racism evolved out of modern European exploration, colonization, and empire-building, beginning as a parlor justification for the designs of merchants, missionaries, slavers, and planters before eventually becoming part of national laws, herrenvolk democracies, grand scientific theses, and everyday consciousness and habits of the Western world. He instead advanced the notion of “racial capitalism” as a corrective to historical materialism, insisting that race predated the historical processes of primitive accumulation and enclosure in Europe and was deeply implicated in the birth of capitalism as a modern historical phenomenon. What becomes apparent in his formulation of racial capitalism is that race is not merely a modifier, but given his historiographic claims, it is a central driver of capitalism’s historical expansion and mode of functioning. Moreover, the book diminishes the discrete historical motives, commitments, and deeds of actual black socialists in the twentieth century. In an interpretative sleight-of-hand that hinges on race-essentialist epistemology, when Robinson does take up black Marxists, he treats them as wayward and alienated from an authentic tradition of black radicalism, which is putatively distinct from Western Marxism, socialist parties, and industrial labor struggles.

Since his passing in 2016, Robinson’s work has gained prominence among academics and some activists in popular black movements who have demanded reparations for slavery, colonial plunder, and apartheid. Over the last decade, numerous special journal issues, conferences, symposia, and research initiatives have been inspired by Robinson’s most well-known work.7 The notion of racial capitalism has been widely embraced by academics and intellectuals, including Robin Kelley, Michael Dawson, Ibram X. Kendi, Michelle Alexander, Jodi Melamed, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Davis, among others. Moreover, the spirit of racial capitalism has suffused mainstream discourse from the New York Times’s celebrated but empirically flawed 1619 Project, which proffered a race-centric creation story of the United States, to the liberal pop cultural fixation on racial wealth disparities born out of the postwar homeownership regime, best represented in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and academics like Richard Rothstein, among many others.8 Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism was even evoked in health disparities discussions of the American Medical Association during the early stages of the novel coronavirus pandemic.9

In the face of racial capitalism’s newfound popularity, sociologist Loïc Wacquant has lamented that we might expect “a crisply enunciated concept informing a set of clear claims about the nature of race, the logics of capitalism,” but “one searches in vain for this clarification.”10 I agree with Wacquant’s assessment, but I also think the currency of racial capitalism has little to do with firm commitments to anti-capitalist analysis and socialist politics in many corners but quite the contrary. These works follow Robinson’s path more or less towards a subject-focus on markets and economic inequality but all the while safely elide the Marxist critique of political economy. The “racial” qualifier pivots away from anti-capitalism and towards the more familiar American liberal terrain of racial wealth disparities discourse, an interpretative shift that betrays Robinson’s political radicalism.11 On this latter note, Zachary Levenson and Marcel Paret lament that “many contemporary social scientists have begun to evacuate the term of its radical origins, citing Robinson whenever economic inequality appears to be racialized—as if ‘inequality’ is what Robinson meant by capitalism, or as if Black Marxism were a book about the political economy of racialized accumulation.”12 This liberal and academic embrace of racial capitalism is yet another indication of the broader social contradictions of our times where we find publics openly anxious about capitalism’s predations, stunning inequality, oligarchy, and creeping fascism but equally dubious about the older paths of popular democratic struggle and socialist transition.

Black Marxism’s sudden popularity after years of obscurity begs the question: how does an anti-Marxist book, written during the late Cold War and published as anti-imperialist wars were still being waged throughout the Southern Hemisphere, become a bible of so many U.S. left-leaning academics and activists in the twenty-first century? Why have so many devotees ignored or made peace with the anti-communist freight of Black Marxism? Here, I build on a neglected strain of criticism of Robinson’s work, a red thread stretching back to August Nimtz’s formative review of Black Marxism to the more recent critical essay by William Robinson, Salvador Rangel, and Hilbourne A. Watson, among others.13 Such works have been swept aside and wrongly dismissed as class-reductionist by those who are devoted to racial capitalism as some alternative to historical materialism.

In what follows, I criticize the political implications of Robinson’s work, as well as the black nationalist origins and assumptions of Black Marxism, elements that are largely neglected by Robinson’s acolytes. Black Marxism should be seen as a less-acknowledged contribution to the broader anti-Marxist turn in African American politics and letters during the late Cold War. Part one of this essay critically examines Robinson’s reading of Marx and Engels and contrasts the historical approach of Black Marxism with the virtues of conjunctural analysis, which I see as a central contribution of historical materialism. The second part examines the origins of Robinson’s rendition of “racial capitalism.” Some have drawn etymological and discursive links between Robinson’s adoption of the phrase and South African communist usage as a way of capturing the unique local conditions of apartheid capitalism.14 Instead, we should locate Robinson’s thinking in the civil rights and Black Power milieu responsible for his political formation. This essay explores the patent limitations of his anti-materialist conception of history and the political claims that flow from it. What is missing from both Robinson’s grand historical narrative of racial capitalism and his positioning of the black radical tradition as an autonomous revolutionary project is the absence of any sustained attention to actually existing historical interests and the contingency and immanent political possibilities that define every historical conjuncture.

I would have much rather penned this criticism of Robinson’s work when he was alive so that he might respond in kind. Sadly, I never had a chance to meet him, but his work was foundational for me as a graduate student during the nineties. As someone who came to historical materialism rather indirectly through the writings of left Pan-Africanists like James, Walter Rodney, and Thomas Sankara, among others, I was initially intrigued but ultimately let down by Robinson’s claims, which suggested a path to a post-capitalist hereafter that somehow did not require the formation of a powerful, broad, interracial working-class opposition. Years after graduate school, I remained ambivalent about the book, but the belated celebrity of Black Marxism, the haute anti-Marxism that has followed, and the mischievous afterlife of his notion of racial capitalism have all prompted this response. Robinson’s black radical tradition is an idealist reading of black social struggles in Africa and the Americas, which diminishes their connections to broader social formations, extensive cross-pollination, and the real solidarity of interracial popular movements. Robinson’s work is highly generative, but there is much to learn from the black anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles unfolding at the time of his writing, struggles that had a progressive, if not revolutionary, impact on the lives and material conditions of millions of people throughout the world.

Misreading Marx and Marxism

Robinson employs the term racial capitalism as a critical alternative to more conventional historical interpretations that see racism as a modern ideological justification of capitalist class relations. Instead, he sees racialism as predating capitalism’s historical evolution and a central dimension to the emergence of the wage labor relation. Robinson contends that the “historical development of world capitalism was influenced in a most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism. This could only be true if the social, psychological, and cultural origins of racism and nationalism both anticipated capitalism in time and formed a piece with those events that contributed directly to its organization of production and exchange.” “Feudal society is the key,” for Robinson, “particularly, the antagonistic commitments, structures, and ambitions that feudal society encompassed are better conceptualized as those of a developing civilization than as elements of a unified tradition” (BM, 9). Robinson’s corrective to the historical Marx treats race as primordial, a position that distorts the meaning and character of racism in relation to other historical prejudices and commits to a politically cynical perspective of history where racism always dominates, exerting social power without end.15

His notion of racial capitalism is derived from a troublesome reading of Marx and Friedrich Engels’s oeuvre. Referring to the Communist Manifesto, Robinson writes: “In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engel’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology.” “As a material force, then,” he continues, “it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency” (BM, 2). Robinson misreads those moments where Marx and Engels contemplate the potential direction and progressive advances of bourgeois society as acts of prediction that were falsified by the subsequent persistence of ethnocentrism, racism, nationalism, and empire.

Marx and Engels, however, were writing in a speculative mode, not a predictive one. Rather than moving along some predetermined path of rationalization as Robinson suggests, Marx and Engels saw historical developments as deeply contingent rather than inevitable, the consequence of political struggles and shifting balance of class forces as much as economic cycles, technological development, and unforeseen events. What Robinson may well miss in those passages of the Communist Manifesto is the progressive, humanistic potential of bourgeois democratic revolution, whose claims of universal emancipation sharpened the social contradictions of the emergent capitalist class order, new dynamic tensions that shaped Marx and Engels’s anticipation of the proletarian, popular revolutions to come. Marx and Engels spoke optimistically of bourgeois democracy and the new cosmopolitan forms of identity beyond feudal class structures, religious doctrines and mythology, and nationalist bonds. The Communist Manifesto hastened a world ruled by greater civil liberties and free association, widely shared wealth, science, and reason rather than a world ruled by brute force, birthright, hatred, ignorance, fear, concentrated power, and wealth.

Robinson also holds that their historical account of the proletariat is derived primarily from analysis of the English working class, a choice that gave rise to a particular ethnocentric blindness about the broader world and a flawed analysis of capitalism. Marx in particular, however, wrote about African chattel slavery, which he abhorred, and the political importance of the American Civil War for the emancipation of blacks and, by extension, all workers.16 When Marx writes in Capital, “Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself, where it is branded in a black skin,” it is clear that he is aware of the reactionary power of racism, especially in maintaining capital’s domination over living labor, but it is worth noting Marx’s choice of words. His reference to labor as being “branded in a black skin” suggests racism as an action, an imposition, which is not a motive unto itself but part of the construction and maintenance of an antebellum labor regime, combining both “free,” domestic, bonded, forced, and non-citizen laborers. Unlike Robinson, who treats racialism as a perennial dimension of conquest, domination, and labor arbitrage, Marx himself treats racism as a contingent and surmountable dimension of historical capital accumulation.

During the American Civil War and its immediate aftermath, we find Marx and Engels eagerly following the week-to-week developments in the press and championing the cause of anti-slavery all along the way. For them, the fate of the working class was bound to the achievement of abolition. Writing on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx had this to say, in a letter to Abraham Lincoln, dated 7 January 1865: “While the workingmen, the true power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor ….”17 “The working men of Europe feel sure that as the American War for Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class,” Marx concluded, “so the American antislavery war will do for the working classes.”18 Both Engels and Marx were optimistic in the wake of the union victory and deeply saddened when Lincoln was assassinated. In a letter to Marx dated 15 July 1865, Engels lamented the direction of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, and anticipated the betrayal of emancipation: “I, too, like Mr. Johnson’s policy less and less. His hatred of Negroes comes out more and more violently, while as against the old lords of the South he lets all power go out of his hands. If things go on like this, in six months all the old villains of secession will be sitting in Congress at Washington,” he continued, “Without colored suffrage nothing whatever can be done there, and J[ohnson] leaves it to the vanquished, the ex-slaveholders to decide upon the matter. It is too absurd.”19 Their correspondences are spirited, deeply informed, and, in certain moments, downright giddy and provide ample evidence of their anti-racist commitments and their keen appreciation of historical conjuncture.

There are places where Robinson cites the “old Moor” favorably. Robinson quotes a December 1846 letter to P.V. Annenkov, where Marx writes: “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” (BM, 81). Ironically, when he cites such passages, Robinson’s claims regarding the myopia of the Western Marxism contradict the actual substance of Marx and Engels writings, not to mention the few generations of historical materialists who have followed in their wake. And yet somehow Robinson seems confident in conclusions such as this: “Driven, however, by the need to achieve scientific elegance and interpretative economy demanded by theory, Marx consigned race, gender, culture, and history to the dustbin. Fully aware of the constant place women and children held in the workforce, Marx still deemed them so unimportant as a proportion of wage labor that he tossed them, with slave labor and peasants, into the imagined abyss signified by precapitalist, noncapitalist, and primitive accumulation” (BM, xxix). This is not true, but again these are claims that are based on a flawed reading. We might grant some leeway, given that certain Marxist texts may not have been available in English and the U.S. marketplace at the time of Robinson’s writing, but only so much clemency.

Both Marx and Engels discussed the local, discrete experiences of workers in considerable detail. Engels’s writings on Irish labor in The Condition of the Working Class in England and Marx’s mature ruminations on the industrial reserve army in Capital both reflect an attempt to not only comprehend the different subject positions of workers but also the role of xenophobia and ethnic discrimination in labor segmentation and the process of valorization.20 Also, contra Robinson’s claims elsewhere in the book, Marx offered analyses of how women and children were increasingly pulled into the vortex of manufacturing wage labor and the devastating consequences of those processes for the health, mortality, and the general condition of the laboring classes. Far from ignoring race, gender, and age, Marx and Engels described how existing social stratification was mobilized to the benefit of capital. Subsequent proponents of racial capitalism build on this unstable foundation and inherit the limitations of Robinson’s errant reading of Marxism.

My earliest encounter with Black Marxism was in late 1994 at Everyone’s Place, an Afrocentric market and gathering space on Baltimore’s North Avenue. The store’s second floor was stocked with classic black fiction, social and historical analyses, political pamphlets, Afrocentric histories, self-help tracts, cookbooks, and black pulp romance novels. I first spotted the Zed edition of Black Marxism shelved among Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization, Marimba Ani’s Yurugu, Pathfinder editions of Malcom X speeches, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, George James’s Stolen Legacy, John Henrik Clarke’s African World Revolution, Jan Carew’s Ghosts in Our Blood, and the works of so many other Pan-Africanist luminaries. With some noteworthy exceptions, this was black intellectual culture that survived the Cold War anti-communist purges. In hindsight, it seems figures like Carew, Rodney, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and others continued to circulate within the culture of independent black bookstores primarily because of their Pan-Africanist commitments and substantive contributions to black study—and despite their socialist politics. This black intellectual culture of the Reagan-Bush years, descendant from New Negro autodidacts of the twenties and Black Power nationalism of the sixties, was characterized by race-first politics, broad intellectual curiosity, voracious reading, valuation of public oratory and debate, deep skepticism of Western knowledge claims, a belief in the cultural unity of diverse African populations, and, in some corners, black cultural and moral superiority, a penchant for grand historical narrative, and acceptance of the racial divide as an immutable social fact. All of these characteristics are reflected in Robinson’s Black Marxism. To my mind, this late Cold War black nationalist sub-culture is still where Robinson’s 1983 book belongs in terms of intellectual lineage. In Black Marxism, Robinson engages some of the authors from this milieu. These black nationalist arguments are more central to the origins and substance of Robinson’s claims and limitations than earlier uses of the phrase racial capitalism in the United States and South Africa, which, in most cases, were explicitly Marxist.

Robinson’s Black Power Origins

Some recent works have traced the origins of Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism to seventies debates on the South African left, but Robinson does not make this explicit link in his work.21 With some closer inspection, his critical arguments about Western epistemology and the racial motives of imperial conquests and capitalist expansion have much more in common with U.S. domestic black nationalist discourses than with South African communist intellectuals. It is more helpful that we ground Robinson’s racial capitalism within the context of his own intellectual formation during the sixties and seventies, a time that was defined by black militancy, Third Worldism, anti-imperialist wars, and sharpening political debates about anti-capitalism and black nationalism. It is also important to draw a distinction between his claims and those of Robert Blauner, Bernard Magubane, Harold Wolpe, Martin Legassick, Neville Alexander, and others who offered racial capitalism or “apartheid capitalism” as a means of understanding the unique social and historical conditions of either the United States or South Africa during the sixties and seventies.22 These analyses share more in common with the quality of conjunctural analysis central to historical materialism than with Robinson’s rendition of racial capitalism. As historian Peter James Hudson has noted, while the original concept referred to something very specific within the context of South African apartheid, a way of distinguishing a “colonialism of a special type,” in Robinson’s hands racial capitalism is elevated into a metanarrative of racial oppression, no longer bounded by time and space. “While the South Africans particularize,” Hudson concludes, “Robinson universalizes.”23

Sociologist Robert Blauner was among the first to use the term racial capitalism in his 1972 book, Racial Oppression in America. “For America is clearly a mixed society that must be termed colonial capitalist or racial capitalist,” according to Blauner. “Neither the explanatory framework of colonial theory nor conventional Marxist models of capitalism can adequately capture the complexity and paradoxes of racial oppression in relation to other compelling social forces.”24 Blauner’s approach was critical and eclectic, incorporating Black Power concepts like the colonial analogy alongside the works of Marx, Max Weber, Pierre van den Berghe, and others. He draws on the notion of the reserve army of the unemployed and the dual labor market to help explain racial inequality. “If there is any one key to the systematic privilege that undergirds a racial capitalist society, it is the special advantages of the white population in the labor market.”25 Setting aside this problematic generalization, which suggests whites, whether unemployed or third-generation patricians, universally share advantages within the U.S. economy, Blauner’s use of the term racial capitalism is more concerned with analyzing actual historical conditions and social relations than Robinson’s.

Blauner’s work is anti-racist and anti-capitalist, but he historicizes race and racist thinking and behavior in ways that contrast sharply with Robinson. In an extended note, Blauner reprimands black autoworker and leftist thinker James Boggs for characterizing white workers as counterrevolutionary and enemies of the black movement. In response to this “short-sighted perspective,” Blauner offered a more satisfying analysis of the “white backlash” to civil rights reforms and suggested an implicit anti-capitalist unease lay underneath such reactionary sentiments, which “under certain circumstances could develop into an authentic class consciousness.”26 “The resentment of white workers and white ethnics against the rise of racial minorities,” Blauner cautioned, “is in part a recognition that they—and not the rich and the upper middle classes—are being forced to make the major adjustments and pay the largest burden for the cost of racial reforms, limited as these have been.”27 Robinson experienced this same period of civil rights triumph, expanding opposition to the Vietnam War, the Third World revolutions, and the birth of the New Right, and he emerged from these years with a committed Pan-Africanist perspective and a growing skepticism of Marxism.

In his illuminating and thoroughly researched biography of Robinson, Joshua Myers provides us with a clear sense of Robinson’s formative influences, and his political maturation as a student activist during the sixties. His politics were shaped by a large and supportive family, particularly his grandfather Winston “Cap” Whiteside, the conditions of segregated Oakland at mid-century, and his adolescent experience of integration at Berkeley High School and the University of California.28 At university, Robinson was immersed in a tight-knit community of black students and the Black Power consciousness gaining momentum on campuses and in the streets. Robinson developed the reputation as being “relatively reserved” but known to “punctuate silences with revelations that might not have been obvious to others in the circle.”29 Myers recalls one moment where Robinson’s burgeoning Pan-African consciousness and impatience with the black religiosity of his forebears was made crystal clear. “Asked what precipitated his questioning of the existence of God,” Myers writes, “Cedric muttered a one-word answer: ‘Sharpeville.’”30 He was referring to the 1960 massacre of over ninety black South Africans who were protesting pass laws in the Transvaal region of the country.

Robinson’s high school and college years found him at the epicenter of black student activism and broader anti-imperialist and Black Power movements. His classmate at Burbank Junior High and later at Berkeley High School described Robinson as easygoing and someone who was “clearly interested in socialism and Marxism” (CR, 41). Robinson later joined the Bay Area Student Coalition against the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as SLATE, an organization involved in anti-nuclear activism, pro-Cuba advocacy, and solidarity with the southern desegregation campaigns and farmworker struggles. At UC Berkeley, he served as Vice-President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) alongside then graduate student Herman Blake, and together they helped to bring Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X and NAACP leader and armed self-defense advocate Robert F. Williams to campus on separate occasions. Williams’s visit and his defense of the Cuban revolution had a profound effect on Robinson, who penned a Daily Californian editorial in response to liberal criticisms of the Fidel Castro government. “What Cedric had gleaned was that Cuba’s liberation struggle offered a vision of a future world not yet realized, and therein lay the fears of the West,” Myers writes, “But for those who saw in ‘the West’ the source of their problems, that vision represented something to be embraced rather than feared” (CR, 48). Robinson later organized and served as chairman of the Bay Area Committee for the Monroe Defendants, which was formed to support Robert and Mabel Williams. After they engaged in a shootout with racist vigilantes, the Williamses were forced into exile by local authorities who leveled trumped-up charges against them.

Not surprisingly, Robinson’s campus leadership and growing support for Cuba placed him on a collision course with the university administration. He was suspended from UC Berkeley for his part in an “unauthorized” campus protest of the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs coup d’état against Castro, while rally speakers Donald Warden and Maurice Zeitlin were merely given reprimands. Subsequently, Robinson traveled to Mexico City and later spent two months in Southern Rhodesia through the U.S. State Department-sponsored Operation Crossroads Africa program, a forerunner of the Peace Corps, which was founded by black clergyman James Herman Robinson.31 Along with other members of his group, Robinson was intrigued by the gathering decolonization movements and met multiple times with the organizers of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), a national liberation organization founded by trade unionist Joshua Nkomo in 1961 and later banned by the Rhodesian white settler regime. Robinson and his fellow travelers also visited local schools and ventured out into the countryside to learn more about the lives of ordinary people. “He learned as much as he could of their languages,” writes Myers, “the Shona and Sendebele tongues, and of the history of the Ndebele and Matabele, their migratory patterns, the process of peopling the region—the legacies of Shaka Zulu and Mzilikazi.” What is clear from these biographical details is that Robinson was committed to an anti-imperialist, Third Worldist, and Pan-Africanist project, as were many others of his generation, and his formative academic work through the publication of Black Marxism retains these political commitments alongside a growing skepticism of Marxist thought and politics, which closely resembles the posture of U.S. black cultural nationalists during the same period.

In an early and underappreciated review of Black Marxism, August Nimtz characterized the book as “the most informed and sophisticated defense of the nationalist position” before offering a withering criticism of Robinson’s flawed reading of Marxist theory.32 Robinson’s work can be read as a belated contribution to the so-called two-line struggle of the seventies, which divided black Marxist and black nationalist activists. This conflict was descendant from longer debates within black intellectual culture over the relationship between capitalism and black progress, stretching back to the earliest criticisms of the middle-class politics of race uplift, industrial education, and accommodation embodied by Booker T. Washington and the National Negro Business Alliance.33 Such debates sharpened, however, as the formative civil rights movement grew in institutional strength and political momentum at the start of the twentieth century and concomitantly as black southerners were drawn en masse into the northern manufacturing economy.34 The processes of black migration and urbanization and resulting development of the black press, mass church congregations, civic organizations, relative economic power and social infrastructure, and greater access to education all laid the groundwork for the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Likewise, the 1917 Russian Revolution inspired black intellectuals and activists from Bronzeville to Harlem and from New Orleans to Los Angeles, giving birth to myriad black anti-capitalist tendencies.

The Messenger magazine formed by socialists Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, Communist Party cadre, black activists who joined the Industrial Workers of the World, black unionists across multiple industrial sectors, the African Blood Brotherhood, and other formations constituted a new beachhead of criticism against black entrepreneurship and middle-class uplift politics. At Howard University, a new vanguard of black intellectuals led by Ralph Bunche, Abram Harris, and E. Franklin Frazier would offer unprecedented class analyses of black life.35 New Negro intellectuals like Louise Thompson Patterson, Marvel Cooke, and Claudia Jones; artists like Elizabeth Catlett and Aaron Douglass; and popular writers like Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes expressed their commitments to pro-labor and anti-capitalist struggle.36 The hardship of the Great Depression saw new waves of black labor organizing within independent formations such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union, as well as popular front, interracial movements, and strike actions nationally. The New Negro Left reached its height of national influence when the March on Washington Movement organized by Randolph successfully pressured President Franklin Roosevelt into issuing executive order 8802 in 1941, beginning the wartime desegregation of the defense industries.

During the postwar years, black communists and socialists went underground in the face of McCarthyite inquisition, but the momentum of southern civil rights struggles and decolonization movements abroad would force the questions of anti-capitalism and revolution back into the forefront. The coming of black governance sharpened existing tensions within black political life in the United States that were partially suppressed by the fact of Jim Crow segregation as a universal problem facing blacks regardless of class, status, or educational attainment. Black nationalist leaders and the race women and men of the New Negro years were dedicated to the expansion of a parallel economy, where blacks came to replace absentee landlords and white merchants within the confines of the black ghetto. During the late sixties, such black empowerment sentiments justified a more expansive notion of property ownership and institutional recognition. Black control came to mean everything from black political power through integration into governing institutions—e.g., local anti-poverty programs, planning commissions, city councils, and mayors’ offices—to greater integration into corporate management, universities, and the mass culture industry. Within this emerging political context, black activists in the sixties were faced with the long-deferred dream of real power, and the arrival of black governance throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent brought new contradictions, which called into question the actual meaning of black self-determination and the character of social progress.

For a time, sixties Black Power discourse encompassed both romantic and materialist conceptions of Pan-Africanism. By “romantic” I mean those expressions of Pan-Africanism predicated on sense of racial kinship, shared cultural lineage, and political devotion as opposed to materialist conceptions that foreground common subjection to processes of dispossession, exploitation, and disenfranchisement, which are not exclusive experiences of black diasporic populations.37 I say this as someone who certainly appreciates the joys and virtues of romance in everyday life and revolutionary politics, but as the great Percy Sledge lamented, “Loving eyes can never see.” So, while many black activists and citizens in the U.S. expressed solidarity with national liberation struggles, they did so out of a sense of ancestral kinship and a desire to contest long-standing racist ideas through evidence of black governance. These sentimental racial bonds, however, were tested with the intensification of anti-colonial struggles into the seventies, especially armed conflicts throughout the Portuguese colonies, and the evolution of non-aligned socialist regimes in Africa and the Caribbean and their overthrow by alliances indigenous reactionaries and Western powers. Such developments sharpened ideological tensions and ultimately divided many organizations as activists clarified their relationship to actually existing black socialist movements and regimes.

One of the first and most vile of these ideological clashes happened in southern California and was spurred by state instigation as well as real political rivalries between the Black Panther Party and US, a cultural nationalist organization formed by Maulana Karenga (Ron Everett) and Hakim Jamal amid the 1965 Watts rebellion.38 The January 1969 murders of Black Panther leaders Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins was the most dramatic and infamous incident of this ideological conflict. Members of US organization (where US refers to “Us blacks”) gunned down Carter and Huggins on the campus of UCLA during a struggle over control of the black student union, but the conflict had been simmering much longer, and FBI agents and Los Angeles police inflamed existing tensions through misinformation and false propaganda.39 The Panthers embraced left internationalist politics of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism and cosmopolitan forms of coalition and solidarity. Panther cadre often referred to US organization and other cultural nationalist organizations derisively as “porkchop nationalists” because they saw the black nationalist focus on lifestyles and the recovery of black cultural practices as misguided and a distraction from the more crucial work of confronting capitalist class power in whatever guise.40 Such heightening tensions between black nationalists and socialists rocked other Black Power formations during the seventies.

The 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, has been recalled as the zenith of black unity by the late Manning Marable and, more recently, as the demise of Black Power by historian Leonard N. Moore, but to the extent these authors accept the premise of black unity, such claims invite oversimplification.41 The Gary Convention was fraught with real political divides from its very inception because the very goal of operational unity was misguided, rooted in the Jim Crow fiction that African Americans were a real constituency with a core set of shared interests. While the meeting was able to produce the National Black Political Agenda, which reflected a broad cross-section of black political interests and policy priorities, the black nationalist timbre of the agenda and controversial planks that rejected school busing as a court-mandated strategy for integrating black students into what had been whites-only neighborhood schools, and another pro-Palestinian measure calling for the dismantling of Israel, made whatever dais unity between black politicians and black radical activists short-lived. In hindsight, the difficulty of achieving working unity between the black establishment and movement forces helped to push Amiri Baraka, African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) organizer Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller), and others leftward and towards deeper commitments to Marxist anti-capitalism.

Both Sadaukai and Baraka were central figures in organizing the African Liberation Day mobilizations of the same year as the Gary convention, where thousands gathered in Washington, Toronto, San Francisco, Antigua, Grenada, and Dominica to denounce white settler regimes across Africa. The ALSC, originally called the African Liberation Day Coordinating Committee, emerged from these mobilizations and began funneling money and supplies to national liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. Such struggles were remarkable, achieving some of the largest protests against imperialism in North America at the time and coordinating many different political forces in a way that was more effective and impactful than the Gary Convention’s effort to create a unified black political agenda. The question of how they would relate to the different ideological commitments vying for influence within these national liberation movements ultimately divided ALSC forces. “At the heart of the dispute,” Sadaukai later recalled, “was whether our struggle was purely against racism and the white oppressors or whether it was against the system of class that exploited and mistreated the poor, who overwhelmingly were Black.”42 This was especially the case after Angola’s war for independence ended when ALSC was faced with the choice of supporting either UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola), an organization drawn from the country’s interior, rural Ovimbundu populations, and the Marxist, creole, and Luanda-based MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola). Heated debates over the Angolan situation ensued and broke sharply along nationalist and Marxist lines. Ultimately, some members of ALSC and related formations like Malcolm X Liberation University and Students for Black Unity/Youth for Black Unity formed a more explicitly Marxist national group called the Revolutionary Workers League.43

The sharpening conflicts between Marxists and black nationalists fractured several other Black Power organizations. Nathan Hare resigned from Black Scholar magazine in 1975, claiming the editorial direction had become too Marxist. The National Black Assembly, the continuations apparatus formed out of the 1972 Gary Convention, ultimately voted to oust Amiri Baraka from the leadership as he and other Newark cadre in the Congress of African People and Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN) embraced Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought. After an internal dispute over strategy and membership expansion within the executive committee of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Ken Cockrell, Mike Hamlin, and John Watson broke away to form the Black Workers Congress. These patterns of demobilization and splintering along ideological and sometimes deeply personal lines spelled the end of a heroic cycle of mass protests against Jim Crow and global imperialism.

In the din of seventies debates, we can glimpse arguments that anticipate Robinson’s. Haki Madhubuti, founder of the Institute for Positive Education, Black Books Bulletin, and Third World Press was one of the most vocal opponents of black Marxism during the seventies. Madhubuti published multiple essays on the subject in various movement organs like Black World and Black Scholar, which were collected in the 1978 book, Enemies: The Clash of Races. “The Marxist position is that white racism—which to us is the only functional racism in the world,” wrote Madhubuti, “is a result of the profit motive brought on by the European slave trade and that white racism or anti-Black feeling didn’t exist before such a time.” “It is important to understand that the ideology of white supremacy precedes the economic structure of capitalism and imperialism, the latter of which are falsely stated as the cause of racism,” Madhubuti goes further. “To believe that the white boy mis-used [sic] and manipulated us for centuries up until today for purely economic reasons is racist and void of any historical reality.”44 In the same essay, Madhubuti continues this line about the premodern origins of racism and repeats the common refrain that black Marxists were being manipulated by the white left. As was common at the time, he makes the case for a distinctive Afrocentric worldview and recalls how the achievements of the Nile Valley civilizations of Egypt, Axum, and Kush were arrested and erased by European conquest and colonization. He claims, “Marx and Engels belonged to the 19^th century Europe—the same Europe that had been dealing in Black slaves for over four centuries,” and that “nowhere in Marx’s and Engels’ writing do we find any opposition to the white supremacist theories of their day.” Madhubuti then punctuates his criticism by asserting Marx and Engels were “pro-slavery.”45

As noted above, such claims are demonstrably false. If we set aside his vitriol, however, Madhubuti’s criticisms are consonant with those Robinson makes in Black Marxism. Both see race as a premodern phenomenon. Hence, capitalism was profoundly constituted by white supremacy for Madhubuti and racialism for Robinson. In the analyses of Madhubuti and Robinson, black political expression and interests cannot be subsumed under a broader proletarian class struggle, even where blacks comprise the working class. Instead, black movements possess an autonomy and cultural distinctiveness from whites or any others of similar class position. The takeaway here, whether voiced by Madhubuti or Robinson, is that socialist revolution, either black-led or interracial, is undesirable and unlikely to prevail—despite the many concrete manifestations of black unionism, African and Caribbean post-colonial socialisms, and black anti-capitalist organizations like the Panthers, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Congress of African People, and many other formations at the time of their respective writing. Robinson’s lines of argument and general thinking about race and the making of the modern world have much more in common with the romantic Pan-Africanism of the seventies than the class analysis offered by Blauner, Wolpe, and the rest.

How the West Was Won

In America, the accommodation of Western historical consciousness to racial ideologies created a particular chain of social misperceptions and historical distortions that endured into the present century. Not only was popular thought affected but the very foundations of that American academic thought which first began to mature in the nineteenth century was suffused with racialist assumptions. The emerging American bourgeoisie, in its mercantile, manufacturing, and plantocratic aspects, was purposefully and progressively achieving its first stages of ideological coherence. This intellectual grounding came to absorb the past of those peopling America as well as their present. The result was the construction of the historical legends that obscured the origins and character of the republic and the social relations upon which it rested. The hard edges of class divisions, rooted in the European socioeconomic traditions of English gentry and continental European aristocracies and their lower classes, were softened and obscured by a mythical racial unity. (BM, 76)

Robinson provides a sweeping account of world history, which winds its way from the earliest encounters between Mediterranean and Nile Valley civilizations through the Islamic presence and influence in Spain and the emergence of the Genoese bourgeoisie to the modern European conquest and colonization of African nations. That account, however, too often treats anti-black racism as the motive force of history rather than the consequence of centuries-old processes and in a manner that neglects historical contingency and the presence of other discrete interests that cannot be attributed to racist thinking. This historically-versed ahistoricism is a core problem of Black Marxism, and yet it may well be the sweetener that has drawn so many to embrace the language of racial capitalism in recent years, even if they are not faithful students of Robinson’s particular interpretation of history.

As Joseph Ramsey writes, Robinson’s account of racial capitalism “ultimately tends to understand capitalism as an expression of a transhistorical European racialism, putting forth a monolithic view of ‘Western civilization’ itself as, from the beginning, essentially and uniquely racist and inclined to violent domination.”46 The core problem with Robinson’s account, Ramsey concludes, “is not that racism is emphasized, but that it is ontologized.”47 Indeed, in Robinson’s work, racialism and race stand in for discrete political motivations and real interests in motion, and historical contingency seems to disappear altogether from his account. His narration of the making of the West obscures so much of that history’s complexity. Racialist metanarrative does not convey the manifold and conflicting motivations of sovereigns, influential individuals, wealthy families, joint stock companies, and the bourgeoisie as a class for itself, and their relative successes and failures in advancing their respective interests. And while racial ideology would eventually serve as a justification for empire building, so many other factors were more decisive in determining the strategies, prerogatives, and decisions of the capitalist classes of Portugal, Spain, England, France, the United States, and other imperial powers: economic cycles of boom and bust; speculation and the power of financiers; the perennial triumph and ruin of individual firms; the formation of opportunistic alliances, feuds, mergers, and hostile takeovers—not to mention the constant weight of the coercive laws of competition; the sectoral and cultural changes provoked by technological development; and the unforeseen impacts of depression, war, labor shortages, plagues, famines, and natural and industrial catastrophes on individual and social fortunes.

Robinson’s prose is, at times, seductive and insightful as he recounts the processes of European expansion, but it is primarily idealistic. Rather than concrete historical interests, he emphasizes the power of ideas in various ways, the distinctive cultural character of African versus European peoples, and the hypocrisy of American colonial elites as much as the material force of history. His prose is written largely in passive voice and too often employs personification, treating institutions as historical actors rather than consistently specifying the embodied human subjects in history themselves. Although he references the American bourgeoisie in the passage quoted above, there are other places where “the accommodation of Western historical consciousness to racial ideologies created …,” “popular thought affected …,” and “This intellectual grounding came to absorb ….” among similar phrasings (BM, 76, emphasis added). And like so many contemporary academics and activists, his narration assumes “white,” “black,” “Western,” or “African” are more than contextual descriptors. Instead, the guiding premise seems to be that corporeal identity, the experience of social exclusion, and even consumer choices all tell us something significant and readily knowable about the values, perspectives, and interests of real people. These literary choices disappear any sense of discrete historical interests and constituted power in Robinson’s account of Western civilization from antiquity to the modern capitalist world.

It is true that some Greeks and Romans remarked on the distinct appearances of Africans they encountered. As Robinson notes, when Herodotus encountered the Colchians, he said, “they are black skinned and have woolly hair” (BM, 83). Such descriptions of physical characteristics are not racism, however, and this is where the construct of racialism, which is never defined by Robinson, makes mischief of history. As Frank Snowden documents in his pioneering work on the black presence in Ancient Europe, Africans were not generally viewed by Greeks or Romans as innately inferior as a group because their social relation to those civilizations was not slave-based.48 Instead, Greeks and Romans were more likely to encounter Africans in the roles of merchants, statesmen, or soldiers. Moreover, like Africans themselves, Greeks and Romans would have appreciated the significance of a range of other social, class, religious, ethnic, and national distinctions more so than phenotype.

Robinson’s account gives the impression that modern racism appeared much earlier and that it was a motive force for conquest when it was not. The following passage is exemplary: “In England, at first gripped by a combative and often hysterical Christianity—complements of the crusades, the ‘reconquests,’ and the rise of Italian capitalism—medieval English devouts recorded dreams in which the devil appeared as ‘a blacke moore,’ ‘an Ethiope,’” writes Robinson. “This was part of the grammar of the church, the almost singular repository of knowledge in Europe.” “Centuries later,” Robinson continues, “the Satanic gave way to the representation of Africans as a different sort of beast: dumb, animal labor, the benighted recipient of the benefits of slavery. Thus the ‘Negro’ was conceived” (BM, 3–4). What is missing from this provisional account of racism’s emergence is any sense of historically grounded meaning and relative amplitude. So, while we can find seeds of racist ideas in medieval Europe, seeds are not fully formed trees, no more in the study of ideology than in botany.

Robinson’s narrative might have us believe that racism and profit-making were twinned motives of equal significance from Cristóbal Colón’s 1492 arrival in the Americas through the first importation of African slaves at the Jamestown settlement in 1619. “The trade in African slaves,” he writes, “coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object” (BM, 100). Such conclusions are errant for a few reasons. Race was not the driving force of capitalism’s emergence or the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade but rather the material interests of competing merchants, royals, and joint-stock companies. The enrichment of national coffers and personal fortunes drove and gave urgency to the expeditions, settlements, trade agreements, and imperial wars that ensued. On this subject of the development of race as popular ideology, the work of historian Barbara J. Fields is far more clarifying than Robinson’s. “The rise of slavery itself on the North American mainland was not in essence a racial phenomenon,” Fields writes, “nor was it the inevitable outcome of racial prejudice.”49 Contrary to Robinson’s account, race as we know it would take some time to make its way onto the historical stage and even longer to become a widely understood and legitimate justification for the regimes of chattel bond labor that were central to the establishment and commercial success of the New World colonies. It is easy to become lost in Robinson’s account of pre-modern racial ideas precisely because it is selective and idealistic and one that does not discern between pre-enlightenment forms of prejudice and social conflict and the relative material force of religious doctrines, racist taxonomy, the profit motive, and corporate interests in the historical development of specific slaveholding republics in the Americas.

Robinson’s account of racialism conflates various medieval forms of discrimination, hierarchy, and affinity for modern racism. Racism is a type of prejudice, but not all forms of prejudice are racism. While there were all manner of tribal, ethnic, religious, and sectional prejudices in pre-capitalist Europe, these were not racism. Those forms of difference were not grand metaphysical narratives but were intimately connected to social relations and affinities that existed in concrete time and space, which distinguishes them from the universal racial taxonomy first articulated by Carolus Linnaeus, as well as Johann Blumenbach, Thomas Jefferson, and others who would assign human worth and capacity based on race.50 These figures were not particularly concerned with the situated experiences of particular clans, religious sects, kingdoms, and civilizations and their particular languages, customs, rites, technology, and history; on the contrary, they favored massive generalizations predicated on phenotype and continental divides. Racial taxonomy evolved as imperial shorthand, an ideological mapping that became as central to navigating the emerging commercial world as the stars, shifting winds, and tides.

Even if we concede that there are modes of thinking that prefigure or anticipate modern racism, we should not mistake their appearance for power. Travelogues, biographies, and reports during the periods of exploration and colonization reveal great ambivalence, hypocrisy, honesty, ignorance, humanity, and surprise in the first encounters, treaties, quotidian interactions, collaborations, and betrayals that defined the processes of European incursion, conquest, and imposition of forced labor regimes throughout the Atlantic world.51 “No trader who had to confront and learn to placate the power of an African chief could in practice believe that Africans were docile, childlike, or primitive,” writes Fields. “The practical circumstances in which Europeans confronted Africans in Africa make nonsense of any attempt to encompass Europeans’ reactions to Africans within the literary stereotypes that scholars have traced through the ages as discrete racial attitudes.”52 And this is precisely the problem with the historical account that Robinson provides; social cleavages that predated the emergence of racist ideology are not only presumed to be cognates of race articulated during the age of bourgeois revolution, but these are also assumed to wield similar, even equal, power in widely dissimilar historical contexts.

Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and Jefferson do not make an appearance in Black Marxism. Yet this trinity was more central than any ancient scribe or feudal noble in articulating the taxonomy of human ancestry—“Europæus albescens,” “Africanus nigriculus,” “Americanus rubescens,” and “Asiaticus fuscus”—that are now commonly accepted in the United States as “real” races in the national census, genetic-based genealogy services, most academic work on inequality, and our everyday prejudices and habits. They appear later in historical time than the epochs that Robinson rehearses in his arguments about racialism and racial capitalism. When each of these men offers his contribution to thinking about the human species in racial terms, we find them all delving in quackery and, where necessary, drawing on antiquarian ideas, e.g., four temperaments theory, as well as religious doctrine and their own observations, to give authority to their hypotheses, which in the case of Jefferson, contradicted his own experience of blacks as living, breathing historical subjects.

Perhaps a more direct link between the feudal world and the bourgeois societies that would succeed them is the place of birthright in claims to property and citizenship. The notion of birthright, a legal standing, was central to the reproduction of a natural ordering, a regime of property relations based on inheritance. Such notions of “noble birth,” “low birth,” and “being born of favor” served as a means for protecting familial claims to wealth and power and, for some, gaining entry into the established regime, the council of elders, and so forth. The divine right of kings was contested by the bourgeois philosophers and revolutions, but the hereditary right to property would endure. In England, France, and certainly the United States, even where universal rights, the abolition of serfdom, and republican citizenship were championed, notions of birthright persisted, shaping the extent of the franchise, wealth accumulation, and the transfer of property and the composition of governing coalitions.

In the United States, property-ownership would define the constitutional right to citizenship until the Jacksonian period, and even after, the extension of real suffrage to landless white men was subject to repression and curtailment throughout the nineteenth century. The powerful did not view the landless, bonded laborers, hired hands, homemakers, and slaves as self-governing and worthy of citizenship, and the achievement of real universal suffrage did not come without successive popular movements lasting the first two centuries of the country’s existence. The notion of birthright—not the more circumscribed terrain of race ideology—is the connective tissue binding bourgeois democracy, patriarchy, racial chattel slavery, and the reproduction of colonial and antebellum class hierarchy.

Far from being a resolved matter during the American Revolution and constitutional ratification, slavery was the subject of considerable debate, consternation, ambivalence, overt self-interests of particular classes, and part of the deeper ruling-class anxiety about “majority tyranny,” their fears of mass protests capable of overrunning bourgeois rule. Amid the Golden Hill and Nassau Street riots in New York and subsequent King Street riot in Boston, John Adams condemned the protestors as a “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues, and out landish Jack Tarrs,” making clear their interracial, working-class character.53

Perhaps the best example of the post-independence American ruling elite’s preoccupation with too much democracy and further evidence against misusing race as a proxy for political interests is the story of the three-fifths compromise and the making of the 1789 Constitution. Throughout my life, the phrase “three-fifths human” has been deployed within black political discourse as evidence of perennial racial domination in the United States. Of course, this is a misquote of the American Constitution, and the actual context and meaning of that phrase is mostly forgotten or misrepresented in service of the righteous condemnation of white racism. The truth, of course, was more complicated, and the Constitution’s final determinations were checkered with personal and sectoral interests as much as any general sense of superiority among the early American ruling class over blacks and the unpropertied they excluded. The actual debates over congressional apportionment and how the decennial census would be taken reveal much ambiguity, paradoxical motives, and, most of all, a straightforward acknowledgment of the personhood of Africans held in bondage, especially by the planter class. The compromise emerged from a conflict between those Northerners who thought that it was unfair that the enslaved be counted at all and elite Southerners who wanted slaves to be counted fully, even if they were not citizens, all as Southern tax obligations and the relative political apportionment of the region stood in the balance. The resulting language in the constitution referring to “three fifths of all other Persons” does not reflect any denial of personhood or humanity but rather an equally consequential denial of citizenship.54

In the debates during the constitutional convention, Alexander Hamilton was even more explicit in recognizing the personhood of the enslaved, even as he rebuffed Southerners’ desire to count them without the benefit of real inclusion. “Much has been said of the impropriety of representing men who have no will of their own,” wrote Hamilton, “They are men, though degraded to the condition of slavery.” “They are persons known to the municipal laws of the states which they inhabit, as well as to the laws of nature,” Hamilton continued. “But representation and taxation go together …. Would it be just to impose a singular burden, without conferring some adequate advantage?”55

The debates over the 1789 Constitution are significant because they reveal a world dominated by the interests of planters, shipbuilders, artisans, landlords, and traders who are explicit about their motives and interests. Racist ideology was part of their world, taking shape in the writings of Jefferson whose Notes on the State of Virginia justified the political exclusion of blacks through biological racism. Jefferson’s drew confident and bold conclusions about black inferiority: “[t]hey seem to require less sleep … They are at least as brave [as whites], and more adventuresome. But this may proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. … it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior … in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”56 Unlike other figures of the American aristocracy, like James Madison, Jefferson was less worried about the prospects of class war from below. Even in the aftermath of Daniel Shay’s debtors’ rebellion, Jefferson portrayed such uprisings as seasonal and short-lived. Jefferson favored addressing class inequality through various schemes that either distributed land and the vote to landless men, imported German laborers to work alongside native Virginians and tutor them in cultivation and husbandry, and, in the case of slaves, careful breeding and perhaps interracial breeding—as was Jefferson’s personal practice—that would eliminate the worst alleged traits of the African and eventually return the enslaved to the “original” white.57 Still, he shared the broad outlook of the Constitution’s framers in viewing slaves as beyond integration. For Jefferson, such political integration was unwise because it might “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”58 In reality, as a slaveowner, Jefferson had a material stake in the perpetuation of the peculiar institution, a position that required an ideology capable of harmonizing his own interests with his professed ideals.

Such anti-democratic sentiments suffuse the writings of early American colonists, and even more explicitly, rumors and fears of black rebellion and revenge would dominate antebellum life in the states with each new conspiracy, riot, or act of sabotage fueling the intensification of repressive legal measures and policing of the slave population. The Haitian revolution, as Robinson, C.L.R. James, and so many others documented, sent shockwaves through the hemisphere’s slavocracy.59 Where the humanity of slaves could not be denied in truth and social experience, elites rushed in brandishing ever more elaborate discourses of white racial superiority, hoping to stave off the inevitable—abolition, expansive democracy, and black self-governance. So much of this historical contingency in the making and contestation of the concept of race, however, is lost in Robinson’s narrative of racial capitalism.

Instead, a race-essentialist understanding of epistemology lies at the heart of both Robinson’s notions of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. In the former, we find racism intrinsic to “European” culture as early as antiquity and reaching maturation in the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, while he presents African medieval societies and black colonial subjects as innately peaceful and less violent. And in this regard, Robinson’s claims are consonant with a longer line of black nationalist thinking in the United States, which inverts the assumptions of white supremacy and holds that white domination is an endemic phenomenon. Such thinking persists in recurrent popular narratives, such as the Yakub Myth advanced by the Nation of Islam; the planetary-ruling ten percent, e.g., “slave-makers” and “bloodsuckers,” in the cosmology of the Nation of Gods and Earths; as well as popular Afrocentric arguments like those of Madhubuti and Frances Cress Welsing, among others.60

William Robinson, Rangel, and Watson provide a stern rebuttal to Cedric Robinson’s claims about the European propensity for violence. “For Robinson, the European conquest of Africa lies not in superior material capabilities made possible by capitalism but in cultures rendered essentialist, in antagonistic cultural drives,” they write. “Yet the conquest of Africa was very much a matter of material superiority.”61 They recall a 1898 battle along the eastern shore of the Nile River near Khartoum, where one British regiment faced off with 100,000 Nubian soldiers defending the Madhist state. When the fighting stopped, only twenty-seven British soldiers lay dead while the entire Sudanese side perished. This resounding military victory paved the way for British colonization and control of the Nile River not because of culture but, as these authors conclude, “by superior material force.” Such was the story throughout the colonial epoch. “West Africans fought British colonial forces bitterly for decades before they were finally subdued,” Robinson, Rangel, and Watson write, “not because they were averse to violence or had other cultural proclivities that prohibited resistance, but because they simply did not have the same material means, including the military hardware, at the disposal of the invaders (the existence of these material means is explained, in turn, by the productive powers of capitalism in its European core).”62 We can find further evidence of this logic in the victory of Ethiopian forces over Italy in the 1896 Battle of Adwa. Unlike the Madhist Sudanese, Emperor Menelik II had begun stockpiling tens of thousands of rifles, so when his forces faced off with the invading Italian phalanx, they had the advantage of surprise, higher ground, and superior firepower.63 When the battle ended, over five thousand Italian troops were dead, and hundreds more were taken prisoner. Not cultural propensities, but material-technological advantages were the decisive factor.

Robinson’s related claim that a core feature of the black radical tradition has been the absence of mass violence is equally problematic. “Western observers, often candid in their amazement,” Robinson writes, “have repeatedly remarked that in the vast series of encounters between Blacks and their oppressors, only some of which have been recounted above, Blacks have seldom employed the level of violence that they (the Westerners) understood the situation required” (BM, 168). After giving some accounting of the relatively low levels of violence against whites during various black revolts, Robinson concedes there was violence, “but in this tradition it was most often turned inward: the active against the passive, or as was the case of Nongquase of 1856, the community against its material aspect.” This historical case, however, does not seem to help his argument. He is referring to an incident where upwards of 400,000 cattle were slaughtered in Xhosaland after the prophecy of a fifteen-year-old girl, an act that triggered massive famine and the deaths of 40,000 people.64

Robinson rightly rebuffs those who reported the incident as savagery, but he claims that such violence “was not inspired by an external object, it was not understood as part of an attack on a system, or an engagement with an abstraction of oppressive structures and relations.” Rather, “it was their ‘Jonestown,’ our Nongquase,” he concluded. “The renunciation of actual being for historical being: the preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses. For them defeat or victory was an internal affair.” Robinson’s conclusion that the Xhosa cattle-killing incident was not “inspired by an external object” does not square with the facts of the story. Nongquase prophesied that white settlers would be driven into the sea if farmers abandoned their crops and slaughtered their cattle. Therefore, those who took her advice were at least in part motivated by anti-colonial sentiment.

Robinson’s insistence on a racialized notion of epistemology as the chief explanatory of European conquests does great damage to actual social relations and embodied interests on the African continent that facilitated the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent partitioning of the continent by European powers, namely the presence of indigenous African compradores who benefited from the processes of colonization and trade. Published nearly a decade before Robinson’s Black Marxism, Nigerian writer Chinweizu Ibekwe’s The West and the Rest of Us provides a sharp counterpoint and, I would argue, a more helpful reading of the making of the modern world, one that explores real historical interests in motion. Chinweizu’s 1975 book was shepherded to publication by novelist Toni Morrison during her historic tenure as senior editor at Random House. During that time, she was responsible for publishing a trove of critical black intellectual works of fiction, memoir, and essays, including Angela Y. Davis’s autobiography and her Women, Race and Class, George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, Huey Newton’s To Die for the People, and the works of Toni Cade Bambara and Henry Dumas, among many others. Chinweizu’s work advanced an anti-imperialist politics and provided what remains a searing criticism of the role of indigenous bourgeois interests in the process of colonization and neo-colonial betrayal.

In contrast to Robinson, Chinweizu does not romanticize precolonial Africa in ways that merely invert and reify racist hierarchy. Instead, his account of the long historical process of European colonization of the African continent gives us what Robinson’s Black Marxism lacks: attention to historical conjuncture and actual interests. Chinweizu described his book as “a long letter to the Third World.”65 It is certainly not romantic Pan-Africanist fare, however, and does not rest on racial epistemological claims where Europeans are uniformly and immutably violent and Africans are universally peaceful. Instead, he tells a series of more complex stories of contact, war, conciliation, more war, betrayals, momentary truces, and resistance. At the heart of his narrative is the view that African peoples are people, and rather than lionize diverse populations, he provides a critical history that emphasizes the presence of real social divisions among African nations, clans, and regional alliances. In other words, his discussion centers politics in ways that Robinson’s does not.

Chinweizu shows how converging class interests between European explorers, missionaries, and slavers and native African elites and merchant classes were pivotal in the initiation of the transatlantic slave trade and the longer story of colonization. What becomes clear in his narrative is that particular technological developments within European societies, namely guns, innovations in ship building and navigation, and the consolidation of wealth and investment structures like joint-stock companies, allowed those nations to advance beyond African societies and gain the upper hand militarily and in the trade relations they established along the western African coast from the Gambia to the Bight of Benin southward to the western Cape. “During the first four centuries of the Euro-African connection,” he writes, “Africa’s feudal societies stagnated or decayed whereas the feudal societies of Europe transformed themselves into industrial capitalist powers.” “As a result,” he concludes, “when Europe and Africa collided at the end of the nineteenth century, Africa was swiftly conquered. Those who had not kept up their end of the power balance were defeated and colonized.” “Africa began the sixteenth century with genuine independence and little disparity in power when compared to Europe,” Chinweizu reminds us.66 The rise of European power globally was never preordained, and that process was not driven fundamentally by notions of white supremacy but by the dynamic scientific and industrial developments spurred by the bourgeois revolutionary age.

Anti-Capitalism Without Class Struggle

When Robinson returned to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1978 to present a paper on Richard Wright, he was met with the restless intellect of Harold Cruse, the former playwright, ex-communist, and founding faculty member of Michigan’s Center for African and African American Studies. Cruse hit the younger Robinson with a flurry of correctives regarding Wright and other figures their work had in common, interrupting Robinson’s talk more than once (CR, 187–91). Though his comments were pointed, Cruse had much more in common with the younger Robinson than his objections may have suggested, especially when we compare their most well-known works. Robinson’s eventual thesis that black Marxists have forsaken the “black radical tradition” reflected in diasporic rebellions is in many ways a more sophisticated reiteration of Cruse’s contention in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual that black creative intellectuals were alienated from their true social basis in black life and vernacular culture. Robinson saw his arguments as a response to Cruse and a rejection of the centrality of the intelligentsia in Cruse’s best-known work.67 The parallel nationalist assumptions remain, however, as both men criticize black elites for being estranged from the culture and felt needs of their true constituency, the black laboring masses, whether in Harlem or Luanda. In the end, however, as philosophy professor Stephen Ferguson points out, Robinson was able to achieve what Cruse could not. “Robinson,” Ferguson concludes “was able to bring about a mass conversion of Black intellectuals to anti-Marxism.”68

We should see Robinson’s landmark work as a kind of anti-capitalism more akin to the early-nineteenth-century utopian socialists who Marx and Engels criticized. His work is characterized by an appreciation of political-economy and how the capitalist world system was forged through imperial war, plunder, and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. This is true of Black Marxism but equally for his later work, An Anthropology of Marxism, where Robinson explored communalist thought and practice that predated the emergence of Marxist socialism and, for that matter, capitalism itself.69 For Robinson, it is not proletarian revolution that will rid the world of capitalism, but rather, he favored anti-capitalist cultures and ways of being, which possess discrete knowledge that cannot be reduced to Western notions of time, order, and civilization. Robinson held that the non-objective character of capitalism meant that slavery, segmented labor regimes, herrenvolk democracies, and all manner of excluded and subaltern classes would persist through capitalist expansion, forestalling the formation of a universal proletarian subject as Marx and Engels anticipated.

Robinson defines the black radical tradition as “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.” “Before the African and New World Black liberation movements of the post-Second World War era, few Western scholars of the African experience,” Robinson contends, “had any conception of the existence of an ideologically based or epistemologically coherent historical tradition of Black radicalism” (BM, 72). He held that this radical tradition was not borne strictly out of the processes of conquest, enslavement, and colonial administration, but rather, its mother seed was the indigenous African cultures that predated European intrusion and practices of the enslaved that preserved and honored their humanity in the face of cruelty and oppression. “Marx had not realized fully,” Robinson writes, “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” (BM, 121–22). “These were the actual terms of their humanity,” he continues. “These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or decultured Blacks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe.” “African labor brought the past with it,” Robinson concludes, “a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension.”70

Historian Robin Kelley has been the foremost apostle of Robinson’s Black Marxism. Kelley has authored forewords to the University of North Carolina Press and Penguin Modern Classics editions of Black Marxism, in addition to multiple articles about the book and Robinson’s legacy. The exuberance of Kelley’s forewords and his boosterism of Robinson reflect the excitement so many of us experienced during our first encounters with the text.71 Black Marxism, for Kelley, “challenges our ‘common sense’ about the history of modernity, nationalism, capitalism, radical ideology, the origins of Western racism, and the worldwide Left from the 1848 revolutions to the present.”72 “Perhaps more than any other book,” he continues, “Black Marxism shifts the center of radical thought and revolution from Europe to the so-called ‘periphery’—to the colonial territories, marginalized colored people of the metropolitan centers of capital, and those Frantz Fanon identified as the ‘wretched of the earth.’”73 In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion, Kelley claimed, “the world bore witness to the Black radical tradition in motion, driving what was arguably the most dynamic mass rebellion against state-sanctioned violence and racial capitalism we have seen in North America since the 1960s—maybe the 1860s.”74 “The boldest activists demanded that we abolish police and prisons and shift the resources funding police and prisons to housing, universal healthcare, living-wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice,” wrote Kelley. “These new abolitionists are not interested in making capitalism fairer, safer, and less racist—they know this is impossible. They want to bring an end to ‘racial capitalism.’”75

Kelley’s claims convey the optimism so many felt in the summer 2020, the belief that the society was at the precipice of transformation, but of course, that was not the case. His characterization of the protests lacks any helpful conjunctural analysis of those events, which were not so much the black radical tradition in motion but something else, a moment when the basic premise of Black Lives Matter, that African Americans are unfairly and disproportionately targeted for police harassment and violence, was accepted by a majority of the American citizenry, even if only momentarily. This was a victory for Black Lives Matter activists, but the George Floyd rebellion should not be subsumed under the black radical tradition or even abolitionism, which cannot accommodate the motivations and interests of millions who took to the streets. Unlike an earlier wave of Black Lives Matter protests, majority-white cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and Kenosha became the epicenters of sustained protests during summer 2020. The vast majority of the protesters nationally and internationally were not black, and very few were committed to police and prison abolition.76 Most of the protesters abhorred Floyd’s undeserved and unjust death, but most Americans across all racial and ethnic demographics remained committed to policing and increased funding of police departments, not dismantling them. In the ensuing months and years since Floyd’s murder, we have witnessed the passage of meaningful state and local reforms, such as revised use of force policy, mandatory body cameras, non-violent units to address mental health crises, etc., but despite these changes, police violence against working-class people has endured with the rate of police killings and injuries of citizens remaining constant. A more careful analysis of the balance of forces at play, constituted power, and actual interests rather than loose talk of the black radical tradition might have provided a more sober, helpful view of that political moment and its consequences.

If we take Kelley’s claim to heart that Black Marxism is not so much a book about racial capitalism but one about rebellion then there are still major interpretive problems flowing from Robinson’s work, especially in regards to politics as an historical process and normative perspective of revolution and social change.77 Kelley’s framing of the book, like so many other contemporary celebrations, accepts Robinson’s questionable reading of Marx and Engels, the problematic race-essentialist notion of epistemology that informs his central concepts of racial capitalism and the black radical tradition, and the book’s penchant for metanarrative over conjunctural analysis.

Robinson’s arguments about the black radical tradition have generated renewed interests in colonial and anti-colonial historiographies, the excavation of neglected local, transnational, diasporic, Pan-African, and anti-imperialist movements and, in the mold of earlier periods of scholarly rediscovery, a deepening of what anti-capitalism has meant in practice. Robinson’s work captures an important truth that anti-capitalist politics has not always emerged from the rational overtures of syndicalism, workers councils, or even from formal party politics uniting working class interests and desires, but instead, their form and substance are myriad. Robinson’s account, however, diminishes how black movements have always been connected to broader interracial social struggles in American life and beyond, despite the reign of segregation and popular racism.

Moments, and sometimes movements, of interracial working-class politics have suffused every decade of American history.78 Robinson reminds us of the tragic events of working-class violence during the 1863 New York draft riots where Irish immigrants murdered scores of blacks and injured hundreds more and, after the Civil War ended, the eventual betrayal of Reconstruction and the rise of white supremacy as a political movement. Yet other equally consequential moments of broad interracial solidarity disappear in the pages of Black Marxism. The Union League meetings convened throughout the South; the work of the Knights of Labor, which organized black workers even as the Knights opposed Chinese immigrant labor; the Populist and Fusion insurgencies throughout the South during the 1890s; formative civil rights organizations like the Comité des Citoyens and the Niagara Movement; the 1892 New Orleans General Strike and the 1907 General Levee Strike, biracial labor actions organized in that city despite racist animosity among black and white dockworkers; the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World; the West Virginia mine wars waged by coal workers, black and white, against companies from 1912 to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921; the founding of the U.S. Communist Party and the swell of popular front organizing during the 1930s; and the Little Steel Strikes of the New Deal period, among so many other campaigns, mostly fall out of frame in Black Marxism.79 These instances of left interracialism are politically significant and more common in U.S. history than our contemporary culture of anti-racist pessimism seems willing and able to acknowledge. Far from serving as evidence of enduring white racism, these events and movements summoned a world beyond capitalist class prerogatives and racist strictures.

His assertion that the black radical tradition is a “specifically African response” does damage to how we might understand black political life. The black radical tradition misrepresents and flattens the complex motives animating black political expressions and actions across vast intercontinental geographies and centuries. So broad is this construct that it can only function effectively as vehicle for canon formation, not as an insightful characterization of politics and everyday life. Robinson does acknowledge social hierarchy and political diversity within the black population, but he most often opts for a discussion of elites and masses rather than a more refined analysis of situated-class interests. Robinson’s later work, especially his 1997 volume Black Movements in America, rehearses the older duality in the postwar discourse of black political thought in the United States, replacing the accommodation-protest and integration-separatist dyads of Black Power period with a focus on the republicanism of black elites and the rebellion and resistance of the black masses. Even still, this juxtaposition of elite to mass politics only dimly illuminates the character of black political life in specific historical contexts.

One of Black Marxism’s most glaring omissions is the virtual absence of attention to the waves of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle that ringed the Atlantic and the Third World during the years Robinson was writing this book. Robinson certainly acknowledges the power of Third Worldist movements. He was an astute observer of global affairs, and his anti-imperialist and anti-apartheid commitments are well-known and reflected in the radio program Third World News Review, the passion project he undertook with UCSB journalism student Corey Dubin and local Santa Barbara activist, Peter Shapiro. Oddly enough, however, Robinson’s rendering of western Marxism does not reckon with the political choices of the scores of black activists, armed guerillas, politicians, and ordinary citizens throughout the diaspora who committed to socialism during the seventies and eighties. Aside from his discussion of James and evocations of figures like Amilcar Cabral, why is this specifically African response—the mass embrace of socialism and Marxist ideas by millions of blacks during the twentieth century—so peripheral to Robinson’s discussion?

In certain pages, he lauds such anti-colonial struggles, only to claim these forces are limited by a false consciousness, a misguided commitment to socialist transition that neglects the cultural tap root of the black radical tradition. “[T]he most formidable apparatus of physical domination and control have disintegrated in the face of the most unlikely oppositions (India, Algeria, Angola, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Mozambique),” he writes, “the total configuration of human experience requires other forms” (BM, 167). “The Black radical tradition has matured, assuming new forms of revolutionary movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America,” and yet he claims that “the evolution of Black radicalism has occurred while it has not been conscious of itself as a tradition” (BM, 316). In these closing pages, Robinson asserts “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” (BM, 317). The black radical tradition, for Robinson “suggests a more complete contradiction.”

These closing pages of Black Marxism are strange indeed, uplifting and prophetic in certain moments but ultimately millenarian, suggesting that it is possible to transform our world through some other process outside the moil of organizing for popular power and imposing a more just order through statecraft. Robinson’s closing arguments underscore the ways his black radical tradition is more didactic than political, more of an exercise in seminar criticism than an approach to thinking and addressing lived conditions and felt needs through political action and possibly revolution. In the end, his black radical tradition does not square with the actual political movements he recognizes in the book’s closing pages, political movements that were held together by mass commitments to socialist politics. The Movement of Young Marxist-Leninists in Senegal, FRELIMO, the Panthers, ALSC, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the New Jewel Movement, the MPLA, the South African Communist Party, the Ação Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Action) in Brazil, and so many other formations were organized around Marxist ideas. By the 1980s, that socialist tradition was over a century in the making and no longer the sole province of industrial workers in European nations. Marxism is a diverse body of anti-capitalist thought and action, defined by continual internal debates that are sometimes more raucous and critical than the charges leveled by anti-Marxists. Although it is presented as a transcontinental and ecumenical tradition, there is little room for politics in Robinson’s black radical tradition, especially for the black masses who gathered under the red banner of internationalist anti-capitalism.

Robinson’s 1983 book has been embraced by a mostly black intellectual stratum in elite universities, activist networks, and the foundation world who share his suspicion of Marxist class analysis, even as their patronage streams and the class position of the professoriate more broadly are threatened by university austerity and illiberal attacks on diversity and area studies-informed curricula. Likewise, the mystique of Robinson’s black radical tradition keeps alive the warming embers of black vanguardism on the American left, which remains central to the self-preservation of a particular black intellectual stratum whose identity, professional mobility, and largesse have long entailed divining the authentic voice of the black mass. And this liberal elite is painfully aware of how those smoldering remnants of black vanguardism might be quickly extinguished by the social misery and vulnerability experienced by ever-growing legions of Americans far beyond the old inner-city ghettos of the liberal imagination and the emergence of broad popular discontent with capitalist rule, conditions that defy the American left’s historical fetishism of black radical movements. The belated popularity of Robinson’s work tells us more about the dismal state of contemporary left politics in the U.S. than it ever could about the origins of racism and capitalism or the alleged failings of Marx and black revolutionaries historically. We should look with skepticism at a book so consonant with anti-socialist sentiments of the late Cold War. In his rejection of proletarian revolution, Robinson stands firmly to the right of those blacks who joined the ranks of union struggles and left revolutionary cadre in the United States and millions more committed to anti-imperialism and state-socialist experiments throughout the Third World.