Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

By Cedric J. Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Jessica Wang and Damien Sojoyner

For Professors: Free E-Exam Copies

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469663739

Cedric J. Robinson

Cedric J. Robinson (1940–2016) was professor of black studies and political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Black Marxism, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, and An Anthropology of Marxism.

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Black Marxism

Black Marxism

The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Revised and Updated Third Edition

Cedric J.Robinson

With a New Foreword by

Robin D. G. Kelley

And a New Preface by

Damien Sojoyner and

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

Copyright © 1983 by Cedric J. Robinson

All rights reserved

Preface to the second edition © 2000 The University of North Carolina Press

Foreword to the third edition © 2020 Robin D. G. Kelley

Preface to the third edition © 2020 Damien Sojoyner and

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

First published 1983 by Zed Press, 57 Caledonian Road,

London NI 9DN; reprinted 2000 by the University of

North Carolina Press.

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Set in Minion type by codeMantra, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-4696-6371-5 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6372-2 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6373-9 (ebook)

ISBN 979-8-8908-6242-6 (pdf)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this book as follows:

Robinson, Cedric J. Black marxism: the making of the

Black radical tradition / Cedric J. Robinson; foreword by

Robin D. G. Kelley; with a new preface by the author.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-4829-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Communism—Africa. 2. Communism—Developing

countries. 3. Afro-American communists. I. Title.

HX 436.5.R63 2000 335.43 ʹ0917 ʹ 496—dc21 99-30995 CIP

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For Leonard and Gary,

for whom there was not enough time

Contents

Foreword: Why Black Marxism? Why Now? by Robin D. G. Kelley

Preface: Unhushable Wit: Pedagogy, Laughter, and Joy in the Classrooms of Cedric J. Robinson by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Preface to the 2000 Edition

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1 The Emergence and Limitations of European Radicalism

1 Racial Capitalism: The Nonobjective Character of Capitalist Development

Europe’s Formation

The First Bourgeoisie

The Modern World Bourgeoisie

The Lower Orders

The Effects of Western Civilization on Capitalism

2 The English Working Class as the Mirror of Production

Poverty and Industrial Capitalism

The Reaction of English Labor

The Colonization of Ireland

English Working-Class Consciousness and the Irish Worker

The Proletariat and the English Working Class

3 Socialist Theory and Nationalism

Socialist Thought: Negation of Feudalism or Capitalism?

From Babeuf to Marx: A Curious Historiography

Marx, Engels, and Nationalism

Marxism and Nationalism

Conclusion

Part 2 The Roots of Black Radicalism

4 The Process and Consequences of Africa’s Transmutation

The Diminution of the Diaspora

The Primary Colors of American Historical Thought

The Destruction of the African Past

Premodern Relations between Africa and Europe

The Mediterranean: Egypt, Greece, and Rome

The Dark Ages: Europe and Africa

Islam, Africa, and Europe

Europe and the Eastern Trade

Islam and the Making of Portugal

Islam and Eurocentrism

5 The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labor

The Genoese Bourgeoisie and the Age of Discovery

Genoese Capital, the Atlantic, and a Legend

African Labor as Capital

The Ledgers of a World System

The Column Marked British Capitalism

6 The Historical Archaeology of the Black Radical Tradition

History and the Mere Slave

Reds, Whites, and Blacks

Black for Red

Black Resistance: The Sixteenth Century

Palmares and Seventeenth-Century Marronage

Black Resistance in North America

The Haitian Revolution

Black Brazil and Resistance

Resistance in the British West Indies

Africa: Revolt at the Source

7 The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition

Part 3 Black Radicalism and Marxist Theory

8 The Formation of an Intelligentsia

Capitalism, Imperialism, and the Black Middle Classes

Western Civilization and the Renegade Black Intelligentsia

9 Historiography and the Black Radical Tradition

Du Bois and the Myths of National History

Du Bois and the Reconstruction of History and American Political Thought

Slavery and Capitalism

Labor, Capitalism, and Slavery

Slavery and Democracy

Reconstruction and the Black Elite

Du Bois, Marx, and Marxism

Bolshevism and American Communism

Black Nationalism

Blacks and Communism

Du Bois and Radical Theory

10 C. L. R. James and the Black Radical Tradition

Black Labor and the Black Middle Classes in Trinidad

The Black Victorian Becomes a Black Jacobin

British Socialism

Black Radicals in the Metropole

The Theory of the Black Jacobin

Coming to Terms with the Marxist Tradition

11 Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory

Marxist Theory and the Black Radical Intellectual

The Novel as Politics

Wright’s Social Theory

Blacks as the Negation of Capitalism

The Outsider as a Critique of Christianity and Marxism

12 An Ending

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword: Why Black Marxism? Why Now?

Robin D. G. Kelley

The Blues is first come from Black—Red, the last, going out to re-come. The cycle the circle. The Red what reading did re adding reproducing revolution, red, old going out into black and coming back through blue Mood Indigo.

—Amiri Baraka¹

In the foreword to the first UNC Press reissue of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, I closed with the following prediction:

I have no doubt that the return of Black Marxism will have as great an impact on current and future generations of thinkers as it had on me almost two decades ago. I am also confident that this time around, it will reach a much larger audience and will be widely discussed in classrooms, forums, and publications that take both the past and the future seriously. Why? Because for all of its illuminating insights, bold proclamations, subtle historical correctives, and fascinating detours along paths still unexplored, Black Marxism’s entire scaffolding rests on one fundamental question: where do we go from here? It is the question that produced this remarkable book in the first place, and it is the question that will bring the next generation to it.²

That was twenty years ago. As I write these words during the summer of 2020, we are witnessing the Black Radical Tradition in motion, driving what is arguably the most dynamic mass rebellion against state-sanctioned violence and racial capitalism we have ever seen in North America since the 1960s—maybe the 1860s. Sparked by the killing of George Perry Floyd Jr., Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others, approximately 26 million people have taken to the streets to protest state-sanctioned racial violence, some demanding that we abolish police and prisons and shift those resources to housing, universal healthcare, living-wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice. The new abolitionists are not interested in making capitalism fairer, safer, and less racist. They know this is impossible. Rather, they want nothing less than to bring an end to racial capitalism.

The state’s reaction to rebellion has also brought us to the precipice of fascism. The organized protests in the streets and other places of public assembly, on campuses, inside prisons, in state houses and courtrooms and police stations, portended the rise of a police state in the United States. For the past several years, the Movement for Black Lives and its dozens of allied organizations warned the country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence and the mass caging of Black and Brown people, we are headed for a fascist state. They issued these warnings before Trump’s election, but standing here in 2020, as armed white militias gun down protesters, as the current regime threatens to hold on to power regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, as the federal government deploys armed force to suppress dissent, rounds up and deports undocumented workers, and intimidates the public, it is easy to conclude that fascism is already here. The crossroads where Black revolt and fascism meet is precisely the space where Cedric’s main interlocutors find the Black Radical Tradition. Black Marxism is, in part, about an earlier generation of Black antifascists, written at the dawn of a global right-wing, neoliberal order that led one political theorist to call it the era of friendly fascism.³ In 1983, the same year Black Marxism came out, Cedric published a brilliant essay on fascism that not only exposed U.S. capitalist support for Mussolini but argued that the Black masses anticipated and resisted the rise of fascism long before it was considered a crisis. Robinson called them premature antifascists who stood in stark opposition to those elites who gave primacy to the interests of the State as an instrument of racial ‘destiny.’⁴

Nearly three decades of movement-building, scholarship, and political education explain why so many people can even say the words defund the police, prison abolition, or racial capitalism. We would not be here if not for Critical Resistance, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, Project South, Organization for Black Struggle (St. Louis), POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), Southerners on New Ground (SONG); INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Sista II Sista, the African American Policy Forum, the Black Radical Congress, the Los Angeles Community Action Network, Miami Workers Center, the Praxis Project, FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment), Queers for Economic Justice, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), Reverend William J. Barber’s Moral Mondays Movement and new Poor People’s Campaign, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, the Free Alabama Movement, and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). We would not be here without Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy, or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, or the abolitionist and anti-capitalist writings of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba, and others. The murders of Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, and so many others spawned a wave of Black radical organizations, notably Black Lives Matter, the Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), Hands Up United, Lost Voices, Millennial Activists United, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Dignity and Power Now, Ella’s Daughters, Assata’s Daughters, Black Feminist Futures Project, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Let Us Breathe Collective, the Movement for Black Lives, The Majority, and Scholars for Social Justice, among many others.⁵

All of these movements and thinkers have, at one time or another, engaged, embraced, or were influenced by Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism. Two key concepts, racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, introduced in these pages almost forty years ago, have become a common part of our shared political language. His ideas have taken hold in activist circles and in the academy since the appearance of the 2000 edition, as well as the publication of Robinson’s Black Movements in America (1997) and Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II (2007). Cedric’s untimely passing on June 5, 2016, followed by the reissue of The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (2016), An Anthropology of Marxism (2019), and the recent publication of On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (2019), edited and with an introduction by H. L. T. Quan, have inspired a generation to finally recognize Cedric Robinson as one of the most important intellectuals of our era. Since 2004, Cedric’s life and work have been the subject of dozens of conferences, symposia, forums, and panels, and countless university courses, not just in the United States but around the world.⁶ And scholarship building on and critically engaging his work, especially Black Marxism, has ballooned since I made note of the fact twenty years ago that the book garnered no major reviews and very little notice in scholarly publications (xviii).⁷

Even more consequential is the extent to which Cedric’s ideas have influenced the struggle on the ground. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition made up of more than 150 organizations, built much of its social justice agenda around a critique of racial capitalism. Its widely publicized statement A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice, which it rolled out two months after Cedric passed, identifies how the combination of slavery, America’s deep-rooted system of racial capitalism, and long-lasting discriminatory institutions have for centuries denied Black people equal access to the wealth created through their labor. Racial capitalism’s driving force was not the invisible hand of the market but the visible fist of state-sanctioned violence, which is why the statement framed ongoing processes of extraction, dispossession, and subjugation as a war on Black people.⁸ By calling for an end to the war on Black people—here and abroad—and the reinvestment of resources from the carceral and military state to education, health, and safety, creating a just, democratically controlled economy, the Movement for Black Lives effectively presents a plan to transform the entire nation, save the planet, and ultimately end racial capitalism. The political theorist Siddhant Issar makes the trenchant observation that the policy statement of the Movement for Black Lives explicitly names racial capitalism in order "to expose and politicize the fact that the capitalist economy is constituted by a racial logic. The need to politicize the link between capitalism and racial domination is itself a response to how this link has been depoliticized and concealed by liberal and influential left theorists of capitalism."⁹

Reckoning with Racial Capitalism

Cedric Robinson did not coin the term racial capitalism. The phrase originated in South Africa around 1976 with the publication of a short paper titled Foreign Investment and the Reproduction of Racial Capitalism in South Africa by Martin Legassick and David Hemson, white South African Marxists affiliated with the African National Congress (ANC). The authors were not proposing a theory of racial capitalism so much as critiquing the liberal belief that the flow of international capital can potentially subvert the apartheid state and replace it with normative, efficient capitalist relations in a multiracial democracy. Their paper implied that dismantling apartheid without overthrowing capitalism would leave in place structures that reproduce racial inequality and the exploitation of all workers.¹⁰ Cedric took the phrase racial capitalism much further, developing it from a description of a specific system to a framework for understanding the general history of capitalism.

Racial capitalism has been the subject of a robust body of scholarship and has become virtually a field unto itself since the re-publication of Black Marxism.¹¹ In fact, the term has become so commonplace in Left circles that when the neo-Marxist philosopher Michael Walzer confessed his ignorance of racial capitalism in the pages of Dissent, social media lit up, shaming and schooling the professor for being a political and theoretical luddite.¹² Walzer’s response, however, is typical of a number of leading Marxist thinkers who have dismissed as insufficiently anti-capitalist the decade-long uprising against state-sanctioned racialized violence, mass criminalization, political disfranchisement, deportation, pipeline expansion, and starvation wages for fast-food and service workers. Racism, like heteropatriarchy, they argue, is not constitutive of capitalism but operates alongside capitalism—an added irritant, as it were—to oppress particular subgroups and divide the working class. When Alex Dubilet questioned the Marxist geographer David Harvey for ignoring or sidelining racialization in the historical and material story of capitalism, especially since the most intense mobilizations [in the United States] against the capitalist order were aimed at anti-Black police violence, Harvey replied that race was simply not part of the logic of capital accumulation. There was nothing inherently anti-capitalist about antiracism, he wrote, adding, I don’t see the current struggles in Ferguson as dealing very much in anti-capitalism."¹³ Similarly, in a short essay published six months after Cedric’s death, Walter Benn Michaels declared,

It’s not racism that creates the difference between classes; it’s capitalism. And it’s not anti-racism that can combat the difference; it’s socialism. . . . You don’t build the left by figuring out which victim has been most victimized; you build it by organizing all the victims. When it comes to the value of universal health care, for example, we don’t need to worry for a second about whether the black descendants of slaves are worse off than the white descendants of coal miners. The goal is not to make sure that black people are no sicker than white people; it’s to make everybody healthy.¹⁴

Just to be clear, to insist that capitalism has always operated within a system and ideology that assigns differential value to human life and labor does not mean that hiring Black cops or incorporating Black elites into the existing power structure will hasten racial capitalism’s demise, or bring us closer to achieving a pure color-blind capitalism. Cedric Robinson never subscribed to this idea, and the movements who find inspiration in his work certainly don’t believe it. So Walzer, Benn Michaels, Harvey, and others are not only attacking straw people but also failing to grasp how the logics of racism fundamentally shape both capital accumulation and the role of the state. We know, for example, that Black people around North St. Louis County took to the streets of Ferguson not only to demand justice for Michael Brown Jr. but also to protest a predatory system of policing that used citations, fees, fines, and arrest warrants to extract millions of dollars from mostly poor, Black, overpoliced communities while extending generous tax abatements to corporations, stripping public schools and essential services of much-needed revenue. And they were fighting for the basic right not to be beaten, tortured, or killed by police (whose raison d’être is to protect property and maintain order). We also know that universal health care, a fundamental long-standing demand of the Black freedom movement, will not by itself magically abolish the conditions that produce racialized health inequities, nor will it guarantee equal, bias-free treatment for patients. Just on a descriptive level, we can plainly see that capitalism does not operate from a purely color-blind market logic but through the ideology of white supremacy. We see it in the history of the policing of Black and Brown communities, land dispossession, displacement, predatory lending, taxation, disfranchisement, and environmental catastrophe; in racial differentials in wages and employment opportunities; in depressed Black home values; in the exclusion of Black people from better schools and public accommodations for which they are taxed; and in the extraction of Black labor and resources to subsidize white wealth accumulation. And we recognize a neoliberal variant of racial capitalism that involves dismantling the welfare state; promoting capital flight; privatizing public schools, hospitals, housing, transit, and other public resources; and the massive growth of police and prisons. These policies have produced scarcity, poverty, alternative (illegal) economies regulated through violence, and environmental and health hazards.¹⁵

Cedric revealed exactly how racial capitalism creates the difference between classes and why antiracism is fundamental to combat the difference. He begins by dismissing the myth that capitalism was the great modernizer giving birth to the proletariat as a universal class. Instead, he writes, the dialectic of proletarianization disciplined the working classes to the importance of distinctions: between ethnics and nationalities; between skilled and unskilled workers; and . . . between races. The persistence and creation of such oppositions within the working classes were a critical aspect of the triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century (42). Just as the Irish were products of very different popular traditions borne and bred under colonialism, the English working class was formed by Anglo Saxon chauvinism, a racial ideology shared across class lines that allowed the English bourgeoisie to rationalize low wages and mistreatment for the Irish.

Building on the work of the Black radical sociologist Oliver Cox, Robinson challenges the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism.¹⁶ Instead, he argues, capitalism emerged within the feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Robinson does not argue that the modern racism originating in the seventeenth century was the same thing; rather, he argues that hierarchies based on constructed racialized difference were already in place prior to the emergence of capitalism. Capitalism was racial not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or to justify slavery and dispossession but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc.), and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and slavery within Europe. Indeed, Robinson suggests that racialization within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. Insisting that modern European nationalism was completely bound up with racialist myths, he reminds us that the ideology of Herrenvolk (governance by an ethnic majority) that drove German colonization of central Europe and Slavic territories explained the inevitability and the naturalness of the domination of some Europeans by other Europeans (27). To acknowledge this is not to diminish anti-Black racism or African slavery but rather to recognize that capitalism was not the great modernizer giving birth to the European proletariat as a universal subject, and the tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones (26).

The consequences explain why Benn Michaels’s injunction to build the left by . . . organizing all the victims is easier said than done. Cedric began Black Marxism in Europe precisely to ask the perennial question that too many traditional Marxists avoid: why have white workers continually failed to recognize and embrace Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous working people as part of their class? What explains the overwhelming participation of white workers in anti-Black mob violence and racial pogroms, or their fierce defense of segregated neighborhoods and schools, or their reluctance to join picket lines in defense of Black workers? Black Marxism explains what Marx and Engels knew but were unwilling to come to terms with: ideologies of racial difference (and to a lesser extent individualism) fractured the proletariat. It was, and is, hardly a universal subject. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society, Cedric writes, pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism (2). At the same time, he does not argue that racial antagonisms between differentiated categories of workers are fixed or immutable; nor does he foreclose those genuine moments of solidarity—the examples he found in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, or in the fugitive gatherings of escaped Africans, white bondsmen, and Indigenous communities. On the contrary, he refutes the very idea of a unified white caste as the natural order of things. He recognized, well before whiteness studies evolved into an academic pursuit, the fragility of white supremacy; racial capitalism’s survival depended not only on the violent subjugation of African and Indigenous people but on keeping whites in line: As a means of obliterating these events, the myth of white solidarity arose and came to dominate American sensibility. It was for the most part a lie but a terribly seductive one. By the end of the nineteenth century it had already substantially displaced the past and mystified the relations of the day. It remains in place (80–81).

The Black Radical Tradition

Cedric takes Marx and Engels to task for underestimating the material force of racial ideology on proletarian consciousness, and for conflating the English working class with the workers of the world. In his preface to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism Cedric writes, Marxism’s internationalism was not global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient explanator of cultural and social forces; and its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom struggles beyond or outside of the metropole (xxx). It is a damning observation. Many would counter by pointing to Marx’s writings on India, the United States, Russia, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and peasants. Others argued that Marx himself never claimed to be doing anything beyond understanding capitalist development in Western Europe. But because neither Marx nor Engels considered the colonies and their plantations central to modern capitalist processes, class struggles within the slave regime or peasant rebellions within the colonial order were ignored or dismissed as underdeveloped or peripheral—especially since they looked nothing like the secular radical humanism of 1848 or 1789.¹⁷

Cedric’s point is that Marx and Engels missed the significance of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically by non-Western peoples who made up the vast majority of the world’s unfree and nonindustrial labor force.¹⁸ Unfree labor in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the islands of the sea were producing the lion’s share of surplus value for a world system of racial capitalism, but the ideological source of their revolts was not the mode of production. Africans kidnapped and drawn into this system were ripped from superstructures with radically different beliefs, morality, cosmology, metaphysics, and intellectual traditions. Robinson observes, Marx had not realized fully 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. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or decultured blanks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension (121–22).

From this observation Robinson unveils the secret history of the Black Radical Tradition, which he describes as a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people (169). The Black Radical Tradition defies racial capitalism’s efforts to re-make African social life and generate new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. Tracing the roots of black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people, he argues that the first waves of African New World revolts were governed not by a critique structured by Western conceptions of freedom but by a total rejection of enslavement and racism as it was experienced. Behind these revolts were not charismatic men but, more often than not, women. In fact, the female-led horizontal formations that are currently at the forefront of resisting state violence and racial capitalism are more in line with the Black Radical Tradition than traditional civil rights organizations. H. L. T. Quan reminds us of the centrality of women in Robinson’s historical archeology of Black revolt. Indeed, Quan writes, the women who people Robinson’s imagination are not the anorexic two-dimensional (mainstream) feminist heroines whom we often encounter in gender-related texts, but the plotters of history. They are women of substance, of imagination, of formidable social force, women who would kill and wage revolutions against the state and the world economy.¹⁹

Africans chose flight and marronage because they were less interested in transforming Western society than in finding a way home, even if it meant death. However, with the advent of formal colonialism and the incorporation of Black labor into a more fully governed social structure emerges the native bourgeoisie, the Black intellectuals whose positions within the political, educational, and bureaucratic structures of the dominant racial and colonial order gave them greater access to European life and thought. Their contradictory role as descendants of the enslaved, victims of racial domination, and tools of empire compelled some of these men and women to rebel, thus producing the radical Black intelligentsia. And it is this intelligentsia that occupies the last section of the book. Robinson reveals how W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright, by confronting Black mass movements, revised Western Marxism or broke with it altogether. The way they came to the Black Radical Tradition was more of an act of recognition than invention; they divined a theory of Black radicalism through what they found in the movements of the Black masses.

The final section of the book has also been a source of confusion and misapprehension. Black Marxism is not a book about Black Marxists or about the ways in which Black intellectuals improved Marxism by attending to race. This fundamental misunderstanding has led even the most sympathetic readers to treat the Black Radical Tradition as a checklist of our favorite Black radical intellectuals. Isn’t Frantz Fanon part of the Black Radical Tradition? What about Claudia Jones? Why not Walter Rodney? Where are the African Marxists? Of course Cedric would agree that these and other figures were both products of, and contributors to, the Black Radical Tradition. As he humbly closes his preface from the 2000 edition, It was never my purpose to exhaust the subject, only to suggest that it was there. But the Black Radical Tradition is not a greatest hits list. Cedric was clear—the Black intellectuals at the center of this work were not the Black Radical Tradition, nor did they stand outside it. Through praxis they discovered it. Or better yet, they were overtaken by it. Marxism was their path toward discovery, but apprehending the Black Radical Tradition required a break with Marx and Engels’s historical materialism. And as far as Cedric was concerned, sometimes the Black intellectuals about whom he writes fell short. Black Marxism is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist. It is a dialectical critique of Marxism that turned to the long history of Black revolt—and to Black radical intellectuals who, in confronting fascism, colonialism, and the prospect of socialism, also turned to the history of Black revolt—to construct a wholly original theory of revolution and interpretation of the history of the modern world.

Cedric’s inveterate modesty notwithstanding, Black Marxism is a monumental achievement. It is one of the most pathbreaking works of political theory to appear in the twentieth century, and it stands alongside Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins as one of the key texts to discern and extend the very theory of Black radicalism that is the subject of the book. In other words, Black Marxism is itself a product of the Black Radical Tradition, and so is its author. If the Black Radical Tradition is, indeed, an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle (xxx), then Black Marxism’s long journey begins in post-Reconstruction Alabama, and even that’s not the whole truth.

Cedric J. Robinson and the Making of Black Marxism

Cedric dedicated his first book, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, to Winston (Cap) Whiteside, grandson of slaves / a man of extraordinary courage and profound understanding / . . . my grandfather and my first teacher. He consistently cited his maternal grandfather’s influence on his intellectual and political development. Cedric was born on November 5, 1940, to a single mother, Clara Whiteside, but raised largely by his extended family in West Oakland, California. His grandparents’ house at 3020 Adeline Street became his second home—sometimes his first—where Cecilia (Mama Do) and Cap doted on their grandson and filled his eager mind with invaluable stories and lessons.²⁰ Although he had little formal education and worked principally as a porter or janitor, Cap owned his Adeline Street home and was respected in his community. He was the first person Cedric encountered who embodied the personal dignity, discipline, quiet intelligence, spiritual and ethical grounding, courage, and commitment to family and community that characterized the Black Radical Tradition.

Born in Mobile, Alabama, on June 7, 1893, Winston Wilmer Whiteside was the youngest of seven children belonging to Clara and Benjamin Whiteside, both of whom had been enslaved. Benjamin was born on a plantation in western North Carolina. He was eighteen when the Civil War ended and saw no future in a mostly white county on the edge of Appalachia, so he traveled south until he hit the water’s edge—the port city of Mobile, Alabama. There he met Clara Mercer, who also left her place of bondage, Virginia, for the promise of a new life in the city. The couple married on May 16, 1870, as the war over the future of American democracy was being waged in the South. They lived through the Reconstruction amendments, the democratization of state constitutions in 1868 promoted in large part by Black political leadership, and the rise of organized racial terror. They found each other in a whirlwind of movement, when families broken up under bondage sought to reunite, when marriage and family and community-building were the priorities of freed people. By the time Winston was born, the South had moved, in Du Bois’s apt words, back towards slavery. In Alabama in 1893 alone, at least twenty Black men and one Black woman had been lynched.²¹ Eight years later, the planter class consolidated its power, rewriting the state constitution to strip Black people of the franchise.

Benjamin and Clara managed to purchase a house and raise seven children on the meager earnings from domestic work, day labor, selling wood, and catering on the side. They didn’t make much, but it was enough to send their youngest, Winston, to school for a bit. He cared for his aging parents, married a neighborhood girl named Corine, who gave birth to their three daughters—the eldest being Cedric’s mother—and then divorced. Cap married Cecilia a few years later. She would be the reason the family ended up in Oakland. According to Cedric, his grandfather fled Mobile after beating up a white hotel manager for trying to sexually assault Cecilia, who worked there as a housekeeper. Cap knocked the man unconscious and left him hanging on a hook in the hotel’s cold storage room. A few days later, he headed west, first to Chicago and then to Oakland, followed by Cecilia and his three daughters, Clara, Lillian, and Wilma. In his book Black Movements in America, Cedric wryly delivers the denouement: Chastened, the manager gained a reputation as one of the best friends of the Negro in Mobile.²²

Cap’s influence on Cedric was profound. Cedric later credited his grandfather, a Seventh-day Adventist, with instilling in him a notion of faith.²³ For Cedric this was less about the existence of God than the recognition of what he later described in Black Marxism as a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses (168). In other words, slavery and racial capitalism were incapable of what Aimé Césaire called thingification so long as Black people can preserve this ontological totality.²⁴

Cedric attended public schools where he learned from Black women and men who held advanced degrees but could not break the professional color bar. He took great pride in his teachers and the challenging intellectual environment they created. But he also listened to elders and ancestors, heeded memories, spirits, and ghostly matters, learned from the extraordinary folks professional historians mistook for ordinary, and discovered in the Black Radical Tradition whole communities in motion—full of imperfections and contradictions but holding on to each other because they had to and because their culture demanded it.

He attended Berkeley High, a school with a reputation for academic excellence, political radicalism, and racism. In the 1950s, Black students at Berkeley were often steered away from college prep courses toward metal shop, and an unspoken color bar separated student activities. But Cedric ignored the counselors, excelled academically, and joined the Language Club, the History Club, the Math Club, Club Español, and served as the first vice president of the newly formed Modern Jazz Club.²⁵ Consequently, the counselors ignored Cedric. He received no assistance or direction with the college admission process. Cedric simply showed up at UC Berkeley’s campus in the fall of 1958 and stood in the registration line, falling in behind Shyamala Gopalan, an incoming doctoral student from India studying endocrinology (and future mother to vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris). They would eventually end up in the same political circles. Perhaps because he followed an international student, was dark skinned, and projected a sense of entitlement at a university with so few Black students, the registrar assumed he was an African national and asked if his government planned to pay his fees.²⁶

Cedric paid his own fees, which in those days amounted to about $60. But to make ends meet he worked—at the campus coffee house, cleaning hotel rooms, and spending his summers working at a cannery. He majored in social anthropology and soon gained a reputation as an activist. He and J. Herman Blake, a sociology doctoral student and future university administrator who would ghostwrite Huey P. Newton’s memoir, Revolutionary Suicide, were principal leaders of the NAACP’s campus chapter. In March 1961 they worked with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to bring Robert F. Williams to speak at Berkeley High’s Little Theater.²⁷ Former president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP, Williams came to prominence after the national leadership suspended him for advocating armed self-defense. In 1960 he traveled to Cuba with a delegation of Black artists and intellectuals, returned home, hoisted a Cuban flag in his backyard, and pledged his support for Fidel Castro. (Just months after his Berkeley visit, Williams and his family took refuge in Cuba to escape trumped-up kidnapping charges.) Blake and Robinson had invited Williams in defiance of national leadership. As Cedric explained to historian Donna Murch, they decided to break with Roy Wilkins and the old guard: We wanted a different kind of analysis, a politics that emerged from an analysis of race in America and race in the globe. . . . These were [the] global as well as [the] international dynamics at the time.²⁸

A month later, the Kennedy administration launched the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Cedric helped organize demonstrations on campus against the invasion and U.S. policy toward Cuba, for which he received a one-semester suspension. The University of California prohibited protests on campus without official approval and forty-eight hours’ notice. In his defense, Cedric countered that the U.S. government did not give them forty-eight hours’ warning before launching the invasion.²⁹ Since he had to finish out the spring term, he continued to agitate. He and Blake had invited Malcolm X to speak on campus in May, only to be rebuffed by the administration. They eventually moved the event off campus.³⁰

Cedric and Blake joined a predominantly Black circle of young radical intellectuals who met informally to discuss questions of Black identity, African decolonization, and historical and contemporary racism. The members included Mary Agnes Lewis, Frederick Douglas Lewis, Donald Hopkins, Leslie and Jim Lacy, Nebby Lou Crawford, Ernest Allen Jr., Margot Dashiell, Welton Smith, Shyamala Gopalan, and Donald Warden—most of whom are named in the preface to Black Marxism as the circle of friends with whom the project had its beginnings (xxxv). Out of these meetings, Donald Warden, a law student, formed the Afro-American Association, whose future members included Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. I can’t stress enough the importance of these gatherings, for it is here—not in the classroom—that Cedric Robinson and his cohorts were not only exposed to Black Studies but co-creating it, laying the foundations for the political and intellectual eruptions on college campuses six, seven years later.³¹

Meanwhile, Cedric spent most of his suspension period traveling through Mexico (his second choice after Cuba). His decision to visit Mexico may have been inspired by Laura Nader, a young anthropology professor who studied Indigenous people in Oaxaca whom he would cite as a major influence. He wandered the country, lived among the people, took photos, improved his Spanish, studied Mexico’s culture and politics, and read. In 1961 he returned to campus for summer session, where he took classes in anthropology and sociology and delivered a damning paper titled Campus Civil Rights Groups and the Administration at a conference organized by the left-leaning campus group SLATE. He criticized the administration’s unremitting hostility toward civil rights organizations, recounting its ban on Malcolm X, and closed with a scathing critique of Berkeley’s student government for its failure to take on the administration.³²

Officially reinstated in the fall of 1961, Cedric resumed his course work and political activities and spent much of the academic year raising money for what would prove to be the formative experience leading to his own discovery of the Black Radical Tradition: a summer in what was then the Central African Federation working with Operation Crossroads Africa. Founded by Reverend James H. Robinson, a prominent activist and pastor of the Presbyterian Church of the Master in Harlem, Operation Crossroads was the prototype for the Peace Corps. Its stated objective was to recruit students to help build libraries, schools, and community centers in Africa, but Robinson and his liberal Cold War funders saw Operation Crossroads as a political and spiritual bulwark against the spread of communism in the Third World. At the same time, his support for anticolonial movements made him a target of the Right.³³

Cedric was part of an eleven-person delegation based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where it was tasked with building a primary school in Tshabalala Township.³⁴ The naive but skeptical group arrived at a crucial moment in Zimbabwe’s history. The federation, which included Zambia and Malawi, had just experienced unprecedented economic growth, with Zimbabwe undergoing rapid industrialization and the United States ramping up production in Zambia’s mines. Consequently, European immigration to Zimbabwe increased, strengthening white settler rule just as African nationalism was resurgent everywhere else on the continent. By the summer of 1962, the ten-year experiment in federation was on the verge of collapse as support for African independence grew. When authorities banned the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress in 1959, it responded by forming the National Democratic Party (NDP) in January 1960. The state then passed the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act, which sanctioned mass detention and crackdowns on demonstrations, resulting in at least eleven deaths in Bulawayo and Salisbury. Ultimately, the NDP was banned on December 9, 1961; ten days later, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) was formed. The white liberal minority continued to support federation based on the belief that Africans in the Northern colonies could electorally overwhelm Zimbabwe’s white settler population and bring about a harmonious, interracial system of governance as a hedge against African nationalism. But liberal dreams were easily crushed when the right-wing settler Rhodesian Front won the majority of seats in the December 1962 elections, forcing ZAPU entirely underground.³⁵

This is the world Cedric experienced in the summer of 1962. Imagine first landing in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, listening to forceful speeches ending in uhuru (freedom), and then arriving in a country named for archimperialist Cecil Rhodes and being forced to hear white businessmen rail against the dangerous and irresponsible ZAPU, and American officials speak on the value of U.S. investments in Southern Africa. Cedric’s diary entries were filled with often riotously funny descriptions of officials—he wrote of being introduced by a vaudevillian team of Finkel and Teriks, the director of African Education for Southern Rhodesia and a Salisbury book-seller-councilor, respectively. And when they witnessed the federal assemblies, he remarked on the pomp of British Rhodesian unicameral parliament which included the African equivalent of Uncle Tom’s."³⁶ At the same time, he got to see major Zimbabwe nationalist leaders speak, including ZAPU founding members Joshua Nkomo and Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, whose speeches he surreptitiously recorded at a rally in July. He also noted in his diary having heard a fantastically valuable lecture on the history of Southern Rhodesia by Dr. [Terrence] Ranger, one of the more controversial figures in Southern Rhodesia.³⁷

Cedric was more interested in ordinary people. He had a reputation for wandering off from the compound and the campsites whenever he heard local music and dancing. When he wasn’t laying brick or joking around with his peers, he could be found at the Tabiso Youth Center speaking with unemployed African men whom he found to be alert and sometimes insensitive.³⁸ The group did get into a row with the so-called leading citizens for allegedly disrespecting them—specifically for refusing to listen to the European point of view, and of siding with the African nationalists. When they visited the Dunlop tire factory, for example, Crossroaders reportedly tried to engage . . . employees in political argument, and compared the difference in wages between African and European employees. And yet when one of the black women in their group was refused service at a restaurant, the leading citizens of Bulawayo had nothing to say.³⁹

Soon after his return, Cedric published his observations on the political situation in Zimbabwe in the Sun-Reporter, San Francisco’s Black-owned newspaper. Unlike the witty diary entries, here he reflects on the sobering realities and inspiring possibilities of Southern Africa in 1962. He excoriates the white settler state for outlawing ZAPU and provides a powerful thumbnail sketch of the history of colonialism in Zimbabwe and the rise of the African nationalist movement. He found in the culture, in the anthem Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika sung across the continent, a liberatory vision of people building, sweating, and toiling for a new world. He met people determined to be free, willing to take on a settler regime backed by Western capitalist nations, by any means necessary. In this brief essay, we can see Cedric coming to terms with the Black Radical Tradition:

The African, unable to operate openly, resorted to the only weapons he has been allowed to keep; his mind and his hands. He burns down missions and farms in the country areas because he is not strong enough yet to face the guns in the cities and townships; where meetings are banned or closely watched, he sings spirituals as the American slaves did a hundred years ago, to tell his people that they will be free again, soon. He has sent delegations repeatedly to the U.N. to plead for his life. He has not been rejected but he has not been effectively helped either, but still he tries.

He situates the revolt in Zimbabwe within a global context that links the Third World to the plight of Black America. Africa understands, Asia understands, you and I and the millions of blacks in the U.S., Brazil, and the West Indies understand, not because we are black or brown but because we have lived it and are living it now. In a letter to his aunt Lillian and uncle Bill Kea, he is even more explicit about how Southern Africa clarified and bolstered his identification with radical nationalism. Americans are afraid of nationalism, he mused, so Negroes are admonished not to use terms such as Black folk. But as a recalcitrant nationalist . . . it was one of my greatest thrills to come to this place, to see my people and, in Nairobi, see them function as complete and responsible human beings. The smallest thing is significant to those who are hungry.⁴⁰

Cedric returned to Berkeley hungrier than ever. He experienced the global character of white supremacy, bore witness to Africans determined to be free on their own terms, and found in Indigenous music and dance an imperative to participate and unite as one. The Black Radical Tradition that had begun to take shape in his political study circles came into sharper focus, becoming flesh. In the meantime, Cedric earned his degree in 1963 and immediately began working for the Alameda County Probation Department. He wasn’t on the job one month before he received a draft notice from the U.S. Army. His ROTC training and his college degree helped him get into the Officer Candidate School at the U.S. Army Artillery and Missile Center, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. In his spare time, he took classes at Cameron College in Lawton, Oklahoma, with the intention of earning an M.A. degree. He didn’t earn the master’s, but he did complete officer training. Fortunately, Cedric was never deployed to Vietnam and chose not to accept another tour.⁴¹

He returned to the Alameda County Probation Department to complete his training as a probation officer and met a new employee named Elizabeth Peters. The product of a middle-class Lebanese American family, born in Oakridge, Tennessee (a town established in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon), Elizabeth also matriculated at Berkeley but was three years behind Cedric. With a degree in criminology and a genuine concern for the fate of kids under the California Youth Authority, she became a counselor in child protective services while Cedric worked with teens at the senior boys’ camp. Although they were both early proponents of what would later be called restorative justice, it became increasingly clear from the urban rebellions and unchecked state repression that the existing criminal justice system was beyond reform. Cedric and Elizabeth saw no future in probation, but they saw a future in each other; in August 1967, they were married.⁴² Here we must pause and acknowledge their symbiotic intellectual partnership. Only Elizabeth can speak with authority on the subject, but it is clear that she became his most important interlocutor, especially as both developed intellectually. While he taught at the University of Michigan, she earned a master’s degree in anthropology. She began to pursue doctoral studies at Binghamton and worked as a graduate assistant in sociology during the founding of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, but she never completed her PhD. Still, she was indispensable to Cedric. His acknowledgment to her in his doctoral dissertation speaks volumes: Elizabeth Robinson was the surest mentor of all.

In the fall of 1966, Cedric began an MA program in political science at San Francisco State University, but before he could finish he thesis, he was recruited by Stanford to pursue a PhD in political theory. He accepted its offer but alerted his prospective mentors that he planned to challenge the discipline’s most basic premises. They failed to heed his warning.

Cedric’s experiences in Southern Africa and his study of African politics and culture ultimately led him to question Western democratic theory. In an essay titled African Politics: Progression or Regression? written for his Stanford graduate seminar on African politics taught by David Abernethy (then a young scholar who wrote on popular education in Africa), Robinson argued that the newly decolonized territories in Africa were not yet nations. Not only did they lack many of the characteristics of a nation—stable communities ‘of people with a territory, history, culture and language in common’—but they had yet to be born (the Latin root of nation). That is to say, the birth of the African nations required shedding Western political structures installed by colonialism and creating their own political institutions.⁴³ More provocatively, he suggested that the modern nation-state is, in fact, a regression or step backward from the stateless societies of some earlier African history. Here he began to reveal the seeds of his argument in Black Marxism, that the Black petit bourgeoisie was disconnected from the political and cultural traditions that sustained anticolonial movements in the past. Those living in exile or European-educated have betrayed the heritage of their predecessors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those indigenous leaders who were committed through their own particular missions to the recovery of life with integrity for the mass of African people. Of course, the alternative path he imagined was not based on modernization theory or industrialization but something different:

Perhaps what is needed are new political organisations without single or even multiple leaders, but with no leaders at all. Leadership is a form which should be held in reserve for crises. In developmental periods, leader directives could be replaced by values, goals, community and mutual identifications. . . . That is a sophisticated social organization; a primitive organization is one where the courts are filled with defendants bound and gagged or where its citizens must be shot down in the streets and terrorized into fitful conformity. In a sophisticated social organization, its members act with decency because they respect each other and possess a code of ethics in common.⁴⁴

His doctoral dissertation, Leadership: A Mythic Paradigm, essentially demolishes the Western presumption that mass movements reflect social order and are maintained and rationalized by the authority of leadership. Challenging the conceits of liberal and Marxist theories of political change, Cedric argues that leadership and political order are essentially fictions. He ultimately concludes that it is not enough to reshape or reformulate Marxist theory to fit the needs of Third World revolution. Instead, he proposed rejecting all universalist theories of political and social order. His critique of the provincializing tendencies of Western sciences reappears in Black Marxism, which is to say, the presumption that European historical phenomena is universal—specifically, the presumption that the nation-state is a natural, logical advance in the development of humankind. In his dissertation, Cedric returns to Zambia and looks to the Tonga for evidence of successful societies that do not depend on the authority of rulers or political leaders to function. For him these were successful modes of social organization, the proof being their ability to survive war, famine, and other disasters, and keep in harmony with the environment. The Tonga represented a model of social stability and social integration more effective than what one finds in the West under the modern nation-state. He writes, The Tonga have come into possession of an understanding of human organization which gives little prominence to the familiars of public-private, autonomy-subject, secret-shared, interest-exclusion oppositions. Each element of Tonga consciousness embraces another to secure its ‘own’ vitality—a game of life of running, jumping, spinning for a thousand-headed, millipede beast whose members would each, if severed, be unfit to survive.⁴⁵ In other words, he found in the Tonga a society completely antithetical to the Western emphasis on individual autonomy. This he called the principal that all are equally incomplete.⁴⁶ Therefore, they require each other and all of life itself, land, animals, and plants, to become complete. The result is a metaphysics of the relatedness of things, of the indivisibility of life.

Cedric’s dissertation was submitted in 1971, but the faculty did not know what to make of it, and most of the original members resigned from his committee citing an inability to understand the work. Only after Cedric threatened legal action was his thesis finally accepted—nearly four years later. It was finally published in 1980 as The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, almost exactly as it was written in 1971.⁴⁷ As he awaited Stanford’s decision, Cedric accepted a tenure-track position in political science and Black Studies at the University of Michigan. During his and Elizabeth’s short stay at Michigan, they created a unique political and intellectual space for students and colleagues to study Black radicalism. Cedric’s closest colleagues included Archie Singham, the independent Marxist from Sri Lanka who wrote about anticolonialism and the Third World; William W. Ellis, whose dissertation examined African voting in the U.N. General Assembly; Joel Samoff, the radical Africanist known for his writings on class formation, underdevelopment, and socialism in Tanzania and his anti-apartheid activism; as well as radical anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Mick Taussig. Cedric also invited C. L. R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Walter Rodney, Grace Lee, and James Boggs to engage the community, which undoubtedly deepened his own knowledge of Western Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition, constructions of race, and racial capitalism.

In 1973, Cedric accepted a position at the State University of New York at Binghamton, first in political science and then later in sociology. He was also appointed chair of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, and he influenced the Braudel Center’s intellectual formation—founded and run by Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein. And it was there, traversing the worlds of Black Studies, historical sociology, and world systems analysis, that most of the pieces came together that would become Black Marxism. The work took six years to complete. He began writing in Binghamton, wrote much of the manuscript during a sabbatical in England, in the village of Radwinter just south of Cambridge, and completed it soon after he became director of the Center for Black Studies Research and professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

When the London-based Zed Press published Black Marxism in 1983, few could have predicted the impact it would have on political theory, political economy, historical analysis, Black Studies, Marxist studies, or our general understanding of the rise of the modern world. It appeared with little fanfare. For years it was treated as a curiosity, grossly misunderstood or simply ignored. Given its current rebirth, some may argue that Black Marxism was simply ahead of its time. Or, to paraphrase the sociologist George Lipsitz quoting the late activist Ivory Perry, perhaps Cedric was on time but the rest of us are late?

How we determine where we are depends on our conception of time. Cedric took Marx’s historical materialism to task in part for its conception of time and temporality. From The Terms of Order to An Anthropology of Marxism, he consistently critiqued Marxism for its fidelity to a stadial view of history and to linear time or teleology. By dismissing a stadial view of history, he did not believe revolts occur at certain stages or only when the objective conditions are ripe. The same applies for books or ideas. And yet there was something in Cedric—perhaps his grandfather’s notion of faith—that related to some utopian elements of Marxism, notably the commitment to eschatological time, or the idea of end times rooted in earlier Christian notions of prophecy. Anyone who has read the Communist Manifesto or sang The Internationale will recognize the promise of proletarian victory and a socialist future. He considered the absence of the promise of a certain future a unique feature of Black radicalism. Only when that radicalism is costumed or achieves an envelope in Black Christianity, he explained in a 2012 lecture, is there a certainty to it. Otherwise it is about a kind of resistance that does not promise triumph or victory at the end, only liberation. No nice package at the end, only that you would be free. . . . Only the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!⁴⁸

Only the promise of liberation captures the essence of Black revolt and introduces a completely different temporality: blues time. Blues time eschews any reassurance that the path to liberation is preordained. Blues time is flexible and improvisatory; it is simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination. As the geographer Clyde Woods taught us, the blues is not a lament but a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity.⁴⁹ Blues time resembles what the anarchist theorist Uri Gordon calls a generative temporality. A generative temporality treats the future itself as indeterminate and full of contingencies.⁵⁰ By thinking of the Black Radical Tradition as generative rather than prefigurative, not only is the future uncertain, but the road is constantly changing, along with new social relations requiring new visions and exposing new contradictions and challenges.

What we are witnessing now, across the country and around the world, is a struggle to interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe. These struggles are not doomed, nor are they guaranteed. Thanks in no small measure to this book, we fight with greater clarity, with a more expansive conception of the task before us, and with ever more questions. Cedric reminded us repeatedly that the forces we face are not as strong as we think. They are held together by guns, tanks, and fictions. They can be disassembled, though that is easier said than done. In the meantime, we need to be prepared to fight for our collective lives.

Notes

1. Amiri Baraka, The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture, Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2 (Autumn 1991): 107.

2. Foreword to Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), xxiii.

3. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (New York: M. E. Evans, 1980). Since its publication in 1980, it has been revised, updated, and reissued a few times—most