Cedric J. Robinson

Robinson’s claim in Black Marxism, published in 1983, starts with Marxism itself. It is a European product that never accounted for its own origins in the racialism of a modernising Europe. It therefore functions as a loyal opposition to European capitalism rather than a real negation of it.

He locates racialism in premodern European civilisation. Against the standard Marxist account, he argues that capitalism did not revolutionise feudalism. It grew up inside feudalism and carried its racial hierarchies forward. Racial capitalism is the name for that: a capitalism never separable from racism, rather than capitalism plus racism.

The true negation, on his account, comes from the Black radical tradition, which he traces from precolonial African cultures through Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright. His interest in those three is in their journey beyond Marxism rather than their Marxism.

The archive flags two things. First, the reception has flattened him. Racial capitalism and the Black radical tradition now travel as slogans detached from the arguments they were made in. Second, this file exists partly because an early version of this archive put a sentence in Robinson’s mouth that is not in his book. The change log carries the correction, and the passage now quoted was checked against the document itself.