Mending the Red-Black Thread: Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition, and the Robinson Thesis

This essay builds on Marxian engagements with Cedric Robinson’s increasingly popular and influential work Black Marxism, arguing that the book is best understood as a project of post-Marxist critique. Robinson’s book, which is now regarded as a classic, asks a series of important questions of Marxism, but each of its major arguments marks a fundamental departure from the theoretical perspectives of both European and Black Marxists. Locating the book in a historical moment of crisis for the Left and intellectual retreat from Marxism, this essay reconsiders Robinson’s relationship with Marxism and his place in the political tradition to which he gave a name: the Black Radical Tradition. The essay makes three main arguments. First, that Robinson’s critiques of the classical Marxist tradition – focused on its apparent economism and Eurocentrism – are based on a flattening of this tradition. Robinson minimises fundamental ruptures within European radicalism, diminishing its rich theoretical possibility by omitting key contributions. While Robinson generates important questions for Marxist theory and is often read as providing a critique immanent or internal to Marxism, his arguments usually represent a marked break from Marxist methodology. Second, Robinson’s critique of classical Marxism does not neatly align with the perspectives of the radical Black intellectuals (most prominently, WEB Du Bois, CLR James, Richard Wright) whom he discusses, and indeed his conclusions are frequently in conflict with them. Robinson’s book ought therefore to be read as an original intervention into debates within the Black Radical Tradition, rather than as a seminal summary of that tradition’s political contributions, which are much less unitary and more classically Marxist than Robinson suggests. Third, the emancipatory project of Black Studies and the research programs convened under Robinson’s influence around racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition will be best served by cautious and critical engagements with Robinson’s seminal work. The generative questions that Robinson asks will, I argue, be better answered through a materialist account of Black history, a syncretic understanding of Black culture, and a nonreductive, revolutionary Marxism providing the guide for political action.