Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. - book reviews

Monthly Review, Sept, 1988 by Cornel West

Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism is the most significant challenge to American Marxist and black left thought and practice since Harold Cruse's The Crisis ofthe Negro Intellectual (1967). Unfortunately, Robinson's book has not yet received the kind of critical attention it deserves. Though published in 1983, the book has already fallen through the cracks-a fate to be avoided if at all possible. This negligence results from the rather disjointcd state of the American academic Left and the dismal state ofthe black intellectual Left: the former has become virtually captive to jargon-ridden discourses in which race receives little or no attention, and the latter is thoroughly disorganized, with no visible means of cultivating and sustaining high-level critical exchange.

Robinson's book is a towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of black radical thought. It is, in many ways, too ambitious. Yet in trying to do too much, Robinson raises the most fundamental questions facing both the black and white Left in America: to what extent are Marxist explanations of social history capable of grasping the many dimensions of racial oppression? What is and ought to be the relation of black rest stance to broader working class insurgency? What is distinctive about dominant forms of black radicalism in contrast to non-black forms? How ought black left intellectuals to relate to the Marxist tradition?

Though more international in scope and erudite in execution, Robinson's project is similar to Cruse's in that it challenges black intellectuals to reconsider Afro-American thought and practice in light of the specificity of the black radical tradition. Like Cruse, Robinson believes that left black intellectuals tend uncritically to accept Marxist analyses which force them "to surrender the cultural survival of their people, the emergent revolutionary consciousness of black nationalism." (p. 435) Unlike Cruse, Robinson does not reject Marxist analyses but wants to use a Marxist method in order to discredit Eurocentric practitioners of Marxism. He concurs that a conception of the forces and relations of production is basic to the critique of capitalist societies-but he also accentuates the importance of cultural terrains of ideological struggle, such as affirming African identities in the face of negative images of blackness in the modern West.

Robinson's fundamental aim is to show that efforts to understand black peoples' history of resistance through the exclusive prism of Marxist analysis are incomplete and inaccurate. This is so because Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience-models that downplay the significance of black people as agents and black communities as conduits of cultural and political resistance. Robinson shows how the conditions of the emergence of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe affected its formulations of class analysis and revolutionary struggle, illustrates how classic Marxist histories have ignored the role of race in the class formation of modcrn societies, discusses the content and character of the black radicalism overlooked by most Marxist thinkers, and reveals the ways in which major black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright tried to make Marxist theory more attuned to the black condition in the modern world.

Like that of most contemporary social scientists, Robinson's writing style is a bit off-putting. Yet the fascinating accounts that move his argument along make it well worth the effort. The scope of his scholarship is impressive; the force of his formulations, often persuasive. He takes the reader by the hand and walks him or her through the complex workings ofthe modern world, emphasizing the way in which capitalist modes of production shaped and were shaped by clashing ethnic, national, and racial allegiances. He then puts forward a critical re-reading of E. P. Thompson's classic The Making of the English Working Class, in light of Thompson's glaring omission of racialism. Robinson's criticism is not that Thompson should simply have added a few remarks about non-British workers to his account of British working class formation, but rather that to take race seriously he would have had to link the formation of British working class consciousness to Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, Irish anti-colonial rebellions (like that of 1798), and the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. Robinson concludes that though working class radicalism is a significant form of resistance to Western capitalism, it is often supportive of certain other defining features of Western civilization such as racialism and chauvinism. In this sense-at the economic, political, and cultural levels-"the European proletariat and its social allies did not constitute the revolutionary subject of history, nor was working class consciousness necessarily the negation of bourgeois culture." (pp. 4-5)

After this examination of the origins and limitations of European working class radicalism, Robinson turns to thc roots of black radicalism. His basic thesis is that while black radicalism in the New World is situated and located within Western capitalist societies, it cannot be fully understood in light of Western models of radicalism. For Robinson, black radicalism.