Note: This piece was originally written as an essay for AAAS 723: Black Marxism, a course at KU. It has since been further edited and refined.
Introduction
Given that Marx was writing around 150 years ago, never completed his planned additional volumes of Capital, and was brought up in a European tradition, there were bound to be gaps in his theories, particularly as they are applied to more modern and non-European conditions. This did not elude Marx in his time, as he recognized that the application of Marxism as a science was necessarily applicable and responsive to the material conditions of a particular situation.1 These various projects then created new knowledge about Marxism and its deployment, building on knowledge discovered prior and addressing the gaps in prior Marxist thinking. From Lenin to Stalin to Mao, Marxism evolved and changed to fit the material conditions it was being deployed in.
For some Black American leaders in the early 20th century, Marxism became a promising tool in their fight for liberation. In their application of Marxism to their material conditions, however, these revolutionaries encountered a shortcoming in the theory’s explanatory power for their situation. In response, many forwarded critiques of Marxism as being incomplete and failing to account for the force of white supremacy.2 Out of this critique emerged a distinct pattern of Black radical thought, often referred to as Black Marxism. What Black Marxists created in the wake of the shortcomings of Marxism was something far more explanatory of the conditions of Black life.
What made this theory different from previous iterations of Marxist theory was its understanding of the status of the Black American as semi-colonial, as subjects who benefit from proximity to empire yet remain under its heel, and thus the need for national self-determination. In doing so, it centered the contradictions of race and racialized hierarchy under colonialism as primary over the contradictions of class under capitalism, changing how the manifestations of forces of oppression were conceptualized in relation to each other. While this was a vastly different framework than earlier Marxist theory and even other contemporary Marxist projects, it remained a project with a distinctive Marxist character all the same. Thus, the understanding of the semi-colonial status of the Black American resulted in the recognition of the need for a radically new Black nation, understood through the framework of Black Marxism.
Black as Semi-Colonial
In his piece “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American”, early Black studies professor and critic of integrationist policy Harold Cruse forwards the idea that Black people in America are under a semi-colonial status. While they are citizens of a country in the imperial core and thus reap some of the material gains of empire in service of the dominant racial group around them, they “have never been equal to whites of any class in economic, social, cultural, or political status.”3 Thus, despite the differences in material conditions between subjugated nations in Africa and Black Americans, they shared the common status as recipients of colonial domination, control, and extraction.
As a result of this status, a crucial response to Black subjugation became a liberatory and revolutionary Black Nationalism. It is the nature of this nationalism, not the need for it, which became a potent subject of disagreement between various Black Marxist thinkers.4 For instance, while Cruse did not reject the idea of a Black bourgeoisie leading the movement, Harry Haywood, a revolutionary thinker and fighter known as the “Black Bolshevik”, critiqued Cruse's homogenizing of the Black masses, arguing it reduces the collective struggle to a bourgeois effort which fails to consider class contradictions.5 Still, they agreed that the response to the status of Black people would need to take the form of a nation of their own.
The dispute between Haywood and Cruse brings up the unique position Black Americans, and broadly Black people the world over, have been put in. Drawing from Leninism, the liberation of the class that is the most oppressed will mean the liberation of all other classes. With their position at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, then, one could argue that revolutionary Black liberation would lead to a broader liberation. With this understanding, groups within Black radicalism began exploring their own subjectivities, finding common between them the origin that made them Other to white capitalist society: colonialism.
Unifying Subjectivities
For centuries, Black women have been articulating something which we may now call an intersectional understanding of subjectivity under colonialism. As Frances Beal recounts from Sojourner Truth’s speech at a Women’s Rights Convention in the 1800s, womanhood has been historically framed through whiteness. Despite all the work she did herself, as a mother and as a slave, Truth was still denied womanhood by white men in power. The patriarchal understanding that women are in need of male help only extends to white women – not to enslaved Black women, made to do the work themselves in exchange for nothing but violence. The “phony luxuries” afforded to white women were still ultimately in service of male gendered domination, but Truth’s statement shows that these gendered “luxuries” were doubly in service of white racial domination, hence Beal’s piece’s title, “Double Jeopardy.”6
Around a hundred years later, the Combahee River Collective explored an approach to identity in this same tradition, bringing in yet more subject positions like queerness and sexuality. Through their analysis of racial and sexual caste in the West, they emphasized the importance of creating a movement which was anti-racist, anti-heterosexist, and anti-capitalist – contrasting themselves with contemporary movements, which often ignored one or more of those crucial aspects. Rather than calling for separation from a society oppressive towards their subject position(s) like white lesbian separationists, the Collective instead called for socialism and revolution to liberate and make human Black women, and by extension, the rest of class society. What stood in the way of such a project, however, was not simply capitalist forces, but the white feminists and Black men who refused to unite with Black women on the basis of racism and/or sexism. In this way, the Collective critiques prior, whiter, more male-centric Marxist projects for failing to fight for the liberation of all.
The common base for these articulations of intersectional oppression is exemplified in Patricia Robinson’s “Poor Black Women.” Robinson presents arguments made by some Black men that birth control is akin to genocide and destroys the potential for the next generation of Black people to engage in revolutionary nation building. The Sisters’ reply to these arguments is that the hierarchy embodied in that idea – Black men above Black women – is deeply problematic. Capitalism is not just in white hands, but in male ones as well, so while both white men and women are historically above both Black men and women, Black men remain above Black women. So long as that remains true, there can be no true liberation. It is no wonder, then, why Black women, and especially working-class Black women, have been so prominent in radical and revolutionary groups, often being on the front lines of the fight for liberation;7 The Black woman occupies a unique subject position at the intersection of race, sex, class, and sometimes gender and sexuality, all at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy. Thus, liberation by and for poor Black women can foster liberation for all.
This culminates in the formation of an understanding of race, among other subject positions, as essential to capitalism. The Black Internal Colony is the product of colonial ideology, a crucial dimension to global capitalism, in which race frames a historical materialist approach to understanding these events better than an Orthodox Marxist approach can. Black people were brought to America as capital to create capital, and this essential subjectivity has not changed in the time since.8 To decolonize and shed the semi-colonial status, then, Black radicals created a project of revolutionary Black nationalism. The realization of this project can take various forms, but the core truth remains that a nation is necessary to address the Black position within coloniality.9
Nationalist Projects
The essence of a ‘nation’ is not reducible to distinctive, definite criteria; it is defined by the perception of the people creating it, with each respective nation taking on the qualities of its constituents.10 For Black Nationalism, it is defined by the commonality of material conditions among working-class Black people as subjects of colonial rule. Black nationalism is a force responsive to external forces of oppression, contrasted by white nationalism which turns inwards towards avarice and cementing existing hierarchies.11
To see what a nationalist project actually looks like, however, one must look beyond the borders of the United States and instead towards Africa, specifically at psychologist and acclaimed theorist Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. While the conditions of Africans were different in important ways from Black Americans, such as their respective proximities to empire and connection to the land on which they lived, insights from Africa can speak to the same colonial reality that defines both groups.
Wretched advocates for doing away with not just colonial countries and borders, but the residue colonialism leaves on a society it destroys. Colonialism burrows its way into the colonial subject’s psyche, their subconscious daily doings, and the structures that shape their lives, making it inescapable through strictly base-focused means. The superstructure is in need of a fundamental reconstitution as well, lest the colonialism cycle back down to the base, growing on everything it touches like black mold. In response, Fanon advocates for the fostering of a national consciousness. Revolution must first address the violence of colonialism with violence of its own, not out of joy or pathology, but out of necessity. Once the colonial regime is toppled, though, a national project must emerge which pursues cultural projects to fight the assumptions, relationalities, and subjectivities which the downed but ever-threatening colonialism has left behind. This is also responsive to projects of Western nation-building in colonized lands, with the destruction of the old state systems and, in its wake, a new national and socio-political consciousness among the people.
As Fanon makes explicitly clear, this new project is entirely socialist in character. To understand how this project is socialist, it may help to establish two things many Black Marxists agree it is not: European and bourgeois.
On European character, Fanon makes clear that the revolutionary nationalist project must reject all elements of the previous colonial powers, and that includes this Europeanism. While Fanon does not advocate for a return to a mythical African past, he does support the creation of projects that can displace hegemonic European ideas implanted by colonialism which are rooted in a distinct Blackness or Africanism. In the preface to Wretched by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, he expands on this idea, challenging fellow European readers of the text to understand how they are complicit in – and often the active perpetrators of – the processes of subjugation and elimination. Some Europeans may harbor good intentions, and may even consider themselves aligned with these new movements, but this is not at the forefront of the new nation’s considerations; It does little for them if a Western leftist, still beholden to their country’s ideologies and entrenched colonality, simply declares that they are aligned with this new national project without materially combatting their country’s role in opposing it. As such, until Europeans can actually decolonize themselves and break down the illusions clouding their psyches, they will remain effectively neutral observers-at-best to the projects of the colonized. Simply put, there are no good colonizers. Europeanism has no place in a revolutionary nation.
This understanding is complemented by analysis done by Muhammad Ahmad of the Reform(/Revolutionary) Action Movement (RAM), exploring the international caste system with the European overclass on top. The sub-hierarchies within this framework show that class, as it is traditionally defined by Marxism, is still a structuring factor, with the white bourgeoisie being above white workers and the Black bourgeoisie being above Black workers, but ultimately, what structures the hierarchy is proximity to European colonial power; White workers remain on top of the Black bourgeoisie. All of this points towards Europeanism and its coloniality – not economic class – as the primary contradiction under a Black Marxist framework. While at first this may seem anti-Marxist, both of these categories, class and coloniality, define one’s relationship with and proximity to the means of production as well as their material conditions. It is no coincidence that Cedric Robinson, the academic who popularized the term ‘Black Marxist’, focused so heavily on European history in his text called Black Marxism. Coloniality, a Europeanist ideology, is what structures Black material conditions above all else.
On the bourgeoisie, the discussion referenced earlier between Haywood and Cruse speaks to the disagreements on the role of the bourgeoisie in Black Nationalism.12 However, at least in more prominent texts, the bourgeoisie are largely excluded from Black nation building projects. In eclectic Black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois’ “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” he explores the class character of Black Americans in relation to the titular Problem. DuBois argues that Black Americans share a proletarian character, with prospective class unity being disrupted by white labor. However, DuBois also critiques Black petty bourgeois groups for preventing unity, rejecting proletarianism and instead standing with the ruling class forces.13 Thus, not only is there challenge unifying across race within class, but also class within race. Fanon’s analysis, as well as Sartre’s preface to it, complement this understanding; more explicitly than DuBois, Fanon argues that a revolution being socialist means there is no place for the bourgeoisie.
Based on the African context Fanon was focusing on, if a national native bourgeoisie was allowed to rise to power, control of the country would shift from from the Western colonists directly to the Western colonists indirectly and by proxy through neocolonialism, as the native bourgeoisie would sooner side with colonial powers along class lines than they would with the lower classes of their nations along national or racial lines. For revolutionary nationalist movements to be truly liberatory, then, Fanon concludes that they must overthrow their nation’s bourgeoisie and decentralize control to the peasantry. The role of the bourgeoisie in revolution is not one of solidarity or support, rather it is one of domination in the same form as that of the colonizers. Because of this, a revolution must be socialist in character. Only then can it remove these bourgeois elements to ensure the resulting nation is truly liberatory and does not reify structures of oppression along racial, class, or colonial lines.
As Amilcar Cabral observes in The Weapon of Theory, a major barrier to anticolonial resistance in colonized countries has been an ideological deficiency and lack of theory supporting movements. While imperialism can be critiqued from afar, applied critique and theory is what creates successful revolution.14 It is no coincidence that many of these revolutions center around the class struggle and national liberation – crucial concepts in Marxist theory. In the pursuit of strategies suggested by various Black theorists, such as the inception of a totally new culture and pursuing the creation of independent Black countries, Marxist theory serves as an invaluable tool. In fact, it can provide explanatory power to the realities of Black, colonially-subjugated life – so long as it is adapted to respond to those material conditions and the structuring forces behind them.
The Marxism in Black Marxism
At its core, Black Marxism remains an inherently Marxist project. The critiques it forwards of the Marxism(s) which preceded it are not so much of the potential of Marxism, rather they tend to be of the scope of what it can critique within its own orthodoxy. While Marxism can explain European class society quite effectively, when it comes to colonized class society, it often fails to consider the manifestations of imperialism as colonialism and white supremacy, which so profoundly structure the material conditions of Black people – in America, in Africa, elsewhere, and even those of other “blackened” races.
The aforementioned Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson explores the Black radical tradition as an inherently Black way of being responsive to the conditions of racial domination, which emerges from coloniality and white supremacy. There is a deep core of racialism within the western tradition, yet “the first forms of struggle in the Black radical tradition… were not structured by a critique of Western society but from a rejection of European slavery and a revulsion of racism in its totality.”15 Robinson argues that this tradition of resistance to and rejection of racialism is at the core of Black Marxism. While orthodox Marxism can obscure the Black character of these organic resistance movements, liberatory teachings from this tradition can inform more traditional, structurally-focused Marxisms, transforming them into something more responsive to Black conditions.
Crucially, Black Marxism isn’t simply the Black radical tradition plus the Marxism which came before, rather it is something more than the sum of those parts; it is a synthesis of both radical traditions responsive to the needs of Black people today. It makes sense, then, why Robinson does not respond to capitalism and racism as simply separate by parallel forces, but instead synthesizes them together in his history as racial capitalism – a description which recognizes the inherently racialized nature of the capitalist system. Discussions of racial capitalism and Black Marxism are responsive to the recognition that racism and class oppression emanate from the same source and run together to constitute one another. Only under this framework can the colonial realities of Blackness be given proper focus.
Marxism orients itself towards projects of national liberation. As many in this tradition have pointed out, projects like the Cuban Revolution serve as an example of what even an incomplete adoption of Marxism can do for a revolutionary nationalist movement, informing revolutionary action with a base of revolutionary theory.16 Moreover Lenin and Marx both explicitly call for the liberation of a national proletariat as a primary goal of the broader proletarian revolution.17 It is perfectly compatible with the core tenets of Marxism, then, to extrapolate out and further define the Marxist framework to pursue decolonial and anticolonial nationalist projects.
Given the necessity of nationalist movements to the decolonial movement, along with Marxism’s critique of imperialist countries, the Marxist framework already had an incomplete critique of colonialism. What it was missing was an explanation of the force in and of itself, especially the realities it creates for its colonized subjects. Black Marxism is responsive to this shortcoming, adapting the Marxist framework and its analytical tools like historical materialism and the class struggle to the realities of colonized Black people, whose statuses were more determined by being colonized than being proletarian.
In re-examining previous Marxist thought on this subject, Black Marxists created a theory uniquely responsive to Black material conditions, using it as a tool to work towards Black liberation, nationhood, and thus decolonization. This is the process of the Marxist science at work!
Endnotes
- Peter Decker, editor of Counterpoint (GegenStandpunkt) delivered an interesting lecture about this in 1990 in Berlin titled “Marxism - Adaptation Lessons or Criticism?”
[Return to text] - Ron Bailey. “Economic aspects of the Black Internal Colony.” The Review of Black Political Economy, vol. 3, no. 4, Sept. 1973, p. 43–72; Mills, Charles W. Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. (Roman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.); Robinson, Patricia. Poor Black Women. (New England Free Press, Boston, MA)
[Return to text] - Harold W. Cruse. “Revolutionary Nationalism And The Afro-American.” Studies on the Left: New Radicalism and the Afro-American, 3rd ed., vol. 2, Studies on the Left, Inc., Madison, Wisconsin, 1968, p. 12–25.
[Return to text] - Who exactly constitutes a “Black Marxist” is subjective, as the ideological project was not clearly structured or highly restrained in its breadth of thought. The term here refers broadly to those who contributed directly to what would later be described as the Black Marxist project, regardless of if they would assign themselves the label of Black Marxist.
[Return to text] - Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism”; Haywood, Harry . “Is the Black Bourgeoisie the Leader of the Black Liberation Movement?” Soulbook 5, Summer 1966, p. 70–75; also see Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. (Liberator Press, Chicago, IL, 1978)
[Return to text] - Beal, Frances. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Third World Women’s Alliance. Black Women’s Manifesto
[Return to text] - Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs, vol. 28, no. 6, June 1949, p. 51–67.
[Return to text] - Bailey, “Economic Aspects”
[Return to text] - Haywood, Harry. Negro Liberation. International Publishers, 1948.
[Return to text] - Connor, Walker. “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a…” Ethnonationalism:The Quest for Understanding (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994) p. 90-117.
[Return to text] - Ahmed, Akbar M. The World Black Revolution, 1966, p. 1-27; (1)-(3).
[Return to text] - Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism”; Haywood, “Is the Black Bourgeoisie”
[Return to text] - DuBois, W.E.B. “Marxism and The Negro Problem”, The Crisis.
[Return to text] - Cabral, Amilcar. “The Weapon of Theory: 14. Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure” Unity and Struggle (New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1979)
[Return to text] - Robinson, Cedric J.. “An Ending”, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Penguin Books, 2021, p. 310.
[Return to text] - Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism”; Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory: 14. Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure” p. 119
[Return to text] - Marx and Engels in Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party., originally published February 1848, mostly in the prefaces; Lenin in Foner, Philip. “13 - New Harlem Radicals and The Messenger: World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution”, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II. (Greenwood Press, CT, 1977)
[Return to text]
References
Ahmed, Akbar M. The World Black Revolution, 1966
Bailey, Ron. “Economic aspects of the Black Internal Colony.” The Review of Black Political Economy, vol. 3, no. 4, Sept. 1973
Beal, Frances. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Third World Women’s Alliance. Black Women’s Manifesto.
Cabral, Amilcar. “The Weapon of Theory: 14. Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure” Unity and Struggle (New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1979)
Charles W. Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. (Roman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.)
Cruse, Harold W. “Revolutionary Nationalism And The Afro-American.” Studies on the Left: New Radicalism and the Afro-American, 3rd ed., vol. 2, Studies on the Left, Inc., Madison, Wisconsin, 1968
Connor, Walker. “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a…” Ethnonationalism:The Quest for Understanding (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994)
Decker, Peter. “Marxism - Adaptation lessons or Criticism?” Ruthless Criticism (lecture, Berlin, 1990)
DuBois, W. E. B. “Marxism and The Negro Problem”, The Crisis.
Haywood, Harry. “Is the Black Bourgeoisie the Leader of the Black Liberation Movement?” Soulbook 5, Summer 1966
Haywood, Harry. Negro Liberation (International Publishers, 1984)
Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs, vol. 28, no. 6, June 1949
Robinson, Cedric J. “An Ending”, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Penguin Books, 2021
Robinson, Patricia. Poor Black Women. (New England Free Press, Boston, MA)
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