“Sifting the “Stony Soil” of Black Marxism:
Cedric Robinson, Richard Wright, and Ellipses of the Black Radical Tradition”
References to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2000) continue to proliferate. As Robin D. G. Kelley wrote in 2017 in the wake of Robinson’s passing, “Today’s insurgent black movements against state violence and mass incarceration call for an end to ‘racial capitalism’ and see their work as part of a ‘black radical tradition’ – terms associated with Robinson’s work” (“What did Cedric Robinson mean”). These words are arguably truer now than they were when Kelley wrote them. In 2017, Boston Review devoted a special issue to Robinson’s legacy. By early 2020, the African American Intellectual History Association had put Black Marxism and “The Black Radical Tradition” (BRT) at the center of its entire annual meeting (Cameron), and Robinson’s opus was appearing in The New York Times as one of Ibram X. Kendi’s prime anti-racist reading recommendations (“Anti-Racist Reading List”). Socialist journals have similarly been drawn towards Robinson, especially in the wake of the massive anti-racist rebellions set off by the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The independent Marxist magazine Monthly Review, for instance, devoted its full summer 2020 double-issue to the concept of “Racial Capitalism.”2 This term, as well as “the black radical tradition,” are now regularly deployed by prominent public intellectuals – from Kelley himself to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, and many lesser-known voices and activist organizations.3
But what do these surging terms mean? And in what sense does their proliferation constitute progress for today’s movements over previous conceptual frames? What do these terms help us to see, and what, if anything, do they obscure?
The appeal of the term “racial capitalism” is easy to understand. The phrase makes available a framework that appears to transcend the perennial and often frustrating debates around “Race vs. Class,” both as historical and social determinants of oppression and as vectors for liberation. Racial Capitalism makes clear from the outset that both racism and capitalism need to be seen as important to the modern world system, and thus to political organizing which aspires to transform that (dis)order. The phrase usefully points to how racism can be used as a means of generating capitalist profit,4 while at the same time insisting that racism and racialization have been fundamental features of modern capitalism, structuring the lived realties of human beings. “Racial capitalism” thus seemingly helps us to move from an “either/or” to a “both/and” when it comes to thinking about race or racism, class or capitalism.5 So far, so good.
Read full article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08854300.2020.1862559?journalCode=csad20
Recovering the Dialectic of Race and Class Struggle in the USA:
In Defense of Richard Wright & Cedric Johnson’s Actually Existing Black Marxism
Cedric Johnson’s contributions to this New Politics Symposium challenge us to confront the complexity of actually existing Black political life without falling back on the homogenizing assumptions of a “Black exceptionalism” that denies African Americans the same level of class, cultural, regional, and ideological diversity routinely extended to other similarly-sized groups (such as, for instance, the entire population of Canada). Johnson further urges us to recognize, in light of “Black Lives Matter,” that slogans which may “galvanize” street mobilization can also “enshroud” crucial underlying issues. Just because a banner or slogan is suddenly popular is not a reason to refrain from critical thinking about it—which is not necessarily to say that such a slogan should be dropped entirely, either. The question then, is how to approach such “race-first” tendencies in light of our broader historical and materialist analyses and socialist politics.
Johnson rejects the hardening of ‘standpoint theory’ into a racially essentialized outlook that fetishizes ascribed identity and enforces ethno-territoriality on critical discourse, policing who is allowed to speak about what, irrespective of the content of what they may have to say. He warns us against demonizing the white working-class and calls out ruling elite attempts to baptize corporations as “progressive” by way of multicultural “blackwashing.” Consistently, he attends to the deeper forces that are driving the contemporary policing crisis in the United States, which are considerably more complex than prevailing meta-stories of transhistorical racism allow. If we want to grasp where exactly the Trumpist “Blue Lives Matter” current is coming from, Johnson reminds us, then we need to grapple with the actual historical and material conditions giving rise to that tendency, even as doing so may trouble cherished movement shibboleths. Overall, Johnson makes a compelling case for orienting socialist politics towards the majoritarian goal of connecting working-class people across ethno-racial lines, uniting all those who are affected negatively by systemic injustices—from mass incarceration and militarized policing, to unemployment and poverty wages—in order to build a popular force capable of making the actual transformations we seek, while outflanking the enemies we face. His work helps us move beyond a simplistic ‘Black and white’ view of the history and problems before us.
The core of the Symposium critics’ response to Johnson seems to be that there is still nonetheless something productive, illuminating, and necessary in foregrounding the injustices of race and racism ‘as such’ (even while noting the importance of class, too). Kim Moody, for instance, suggests the need for both universal and class-based programs and race-based interventions, warning of the danger of equating the established national unions of the Democratic Party with “labor” or “the working-class.” Lester Spence unites with Johnson on the need for broad left and class-based universal programs (like Medicare for All), but also insists on the need to focus on hyper-incarcerated populations, who may be so isolated and disconnected from broader social institutions that they can’t be reached without more targeted action. (Note that Spence appears to assume that those affected by such hyper-incarceration are non-white.) Brian Jones, for his part, referring to the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the #BlackLivesMatter upsurge, asks “Can these two developments be fused?” Jones concedes that what “galvanizes” may often mystify with regards to race, but nonetheless reminds us of the value—from an anti-capitalist perspective—of a good deal of the popular #BlackLivesMatter-aligned writing that has broken through in mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, including regular appearances from the likes of Michelle Alexander, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Ibram X. Kendi. Even if the focus in such venues is generally on the history of racism and contemporary racial inequality rather than capitalism per se, Jones suggests, that frame allows anti-capitalist voices and ideas to gain ground.
A stronger version of Jones’ claim might go on to argue that so entwined are the histories of racism and capitalist exploitation in the USA that one cannot excavate the former without calling the latter into question as well. “You can’t have capitalism without racism,” Malcolm X famously said. Perhaps we could invert and update the saying: “You can’t popularize anti-racism without stirring up anti-capitalism.” It is an appealing notion, suggesting that any expression of anti-racism, even if not consciously committed to socialism or working-class power, is nonetheless creating space for such politics, laying bare the fundamental injustices, inequalities, and violence that structure American capitalism and empire. But is this notion, however appealing, true? Does anti-racism automatically create space for anti-capitalism? Might even the “anti-racist” corporate trainings of Robin DiAngelo and Co. be paving the way for more radical possibilities?
Continue reading at New Politics’ Symposium on Black Lives Matter and the American Left: https://newpol.org/recovering-the-dialectic-of-race-and-class-struggle-in-the-usa/
“Down with the Rebels Against the Bill of Sale!”: Guy Endore’s Radical Reimagining of Haiti and Revolution
One hundred years ago this [last] fall, on the morning of October 7, 1919, a group of two hundred to three hundred armed Haitian rebels launched an attack on U.S. occupation forces in Port-au-Prince. Wielding “swords, machetes, and pikes,” these cacos (as they were called) entered the city with hopes of national liberation, driven to violence by a brutal, racist U.S. occupation.1 This occupation had subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewritten the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country. But though well-armed with grievances, the rebels were outgunned; American troops and their Haitian gendarmerie decimated them with rifles and automatic weapons. Rebel leader Charlemagne Peralte was able to escape (for the moment), but dozens of rebels were slaughtered, their base camp overrun, their one field canon seized.2
By November 1919, Peralte himself would be betrayed and assassinated, his lifeless body strung up and photographed by his killers as so-called proof that resistance was futile. The American occupiers deliberately spread the photo of Peralte’s corpse across Haiti, attempting to demoralize supporters of the uprising. But standing stripped to the waist, strapped to a door with his arms flung wide, the slain Peralte resembled nothing so much as a victim of crucifixion, martyred by the American Rome. The propaganda image boomeranged on its makers, creating an unintended consequence: Charlemagne Peralte became hailed as a national hero.3
As many as three thousand Haitian people would be killed in what has been called the Second Cacos War (1917–20). Yet despite such repression, Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation would continue for the next decade among students, peasants, and workers alike, until the exit of U.S. troops in 1934. As Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat put it in a 2015 New Yorker article:
During the nineteen years of the U.S. occupation, fifteen thousand Haitians were killed. Any resistance to the centralized, U.S.-installed puppet governments was crushed, and a gendarmerie—a combination of army and police, modelled after an occupation force—was created to replace the Marines after they left. Although U.S. troops officially pulled out of Haiti in 1934, the United States exerted some control over Haiti’s finances until 1947.4
The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in Haitian society ever since. As scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot have long shown, the restructuring of the Haitian state during this period—from its financial institutions to its dreaded military police—created an enduring and corrupt governmental entity that answered less to the Haitian people than to local elites and foreign interests.5 (CONTINUE READING at Monthly Review: https://mronline.org/2019/09/07/down-with-the-rebels-against-the-bill-of-sale/ )
“An Empire in Points”
A Review of Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide An Empire
[Originally published in Counterpunch]
For those of you still trying to rinse off the neighbor’s patriotic glitter from the July Fourth weekend, I can’t recommend highly enough the new book by Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Even as a long-time anti-imperialist critic of US foreign policy, I found this book eye-opening and paradigm shifting. I’ll never be able to look at the USA in quite the same way again.
How to Hide an Empire makes clear that the United States has been anything but “great” in its long history as conqueror, occupier, and colonial power. But it also makes clear that, since its inception, the USA has often, indeed always, been “Greater.” That is, from its inception to the present, the United States has never been just a collection of united states, but also a collection of territories and colonies, places divided off from the “States,” where millions live under the reign and the flag of the USA without being full included, recognized, or given full rights as “Americans.” Immerwahr refers to this inclusive whole as the Greater United States, and as his sweeping and well-told cross-continental American history makes clear, recovering the history of what has happened in the US colonies and territories is not just marginal matter. Rather, it has major implications for how we view the US “mainland” itself, as well as the USA’s relationship with the rest of the world, right up to the present.
For those who won’t be able to read the whole book, I’ve tried below to pull together some of the most memorable and startling facts. There is much more to say of course, but for now, I’ll let those facts speak for themselves. As much as Immerwahr himself argues that the main contribution of the book is “perspectival” and not “archival,” there was plenty of history—and the author tells it well—that I’d never heard before. It boggles the mind to think how so much of this could be so thoroughly hidden for so long. How to Hide an Empire indeed….
Ok, so below is a list of astonishing facts I learned from the book, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States :
* The term “America” as a noun was hardly ever used in politics until after 1898, following the US conquest and occupation of territory (from Cuba to the Philippines), when it became explicitly clear that “the United States” was no longer an apt descriptor for a power that ruled over tens of millions of people who lived beneath its flag, but were (as non-whites) considered subjects, largely not as potential citizens.
The Invisible Faculty
[Originally published at The Chronicle Review. Art by James Yang.]
Walking to my bike recently after four hours of teaching, I had to pass through one of those fancy catered events in our new, spangled Integrated Sciences Complex. It was an administration event held to celebrate newly tenured faculty — I could see the PowerPoint slides with all the names up on the giant projector screen, complete with what looked to be an open bar, and trays of hot appetizers circulated on the shoulders of workers in black tie. A dark curtain I’d never noticed before was pulled across the cafe, dividing the food-preparation area from the party. Workers in the back scrambled, as folks in front lifted glasses of well-earned wine, toasting the proud Professors of UMass-Boston.
Here was a room full of my colleagues, an event celebrating academic achievement: teaching and research and service — all things that I hold in high esteem. No doubt I would be among the first to celebrate the work these folks had done. And yet, my gut was seized with ambivalence. Despite my six years of full-time service to UMB, I felt radically excluded. Like I was walking through a country club of which I was not a member.
A memory flashed up from UMB’s convocation in September, where our Save UMB Coalition interrupted the proceedings in protest of plans to jack up parking fees so high that working-class commuter students might be pushed out. At UMB, we take community inclusion seriously.
But I was remembering a less remarkable moment from convocation, during the opening speech by our interim chancellor, Katherine Newman, her first formal address to our entire university community. It was a good speech, in many ways, full of statements about the progressive public mission of UMB, and sincere remarks about our sacred commitment to serving our diverse first-generation, low-income, predominantly working-class student body. Even as I was preparing to stand and protest the parking-fee hike, I couldn’t help but be moved by Newman’s words: so many shared values, articulated so well.
But then Newman took time to introduce all the “faculty” that were joining us at UMB that year. Each new faculty member from each college got a personalized and detailed introduction from their respective dean at the podium. They stood and we clapped and they were acknowledged, and then they sat, and the next one rose, and so on. Each new faculty member receiving their due.
And here’s the thing: There was not one mention of us nontenure-track faculty the entire time. Not one acknowledgment of the people — newbies or veterans — who compose more than half of the UMB faculty, we who do the majority of the actual teaching of students at our institution. (Here at UMB, a typical full-time nontenure-track person teaches four courses per semester to the tenure-track person’s two, and we don’t get sabbaticals. Contrary to the misnomer, most of us are not “part-time;” more often we are “double-time.”)
Over and over the term “faculty” came off Newman’s lips, and each time it meant not me, not us. It meant only the tenure-stream faculty. Hundreds of hard-working, devoted, degree-holding, self-sacrificing, decades-committed but, alas, tenure-barred faculty were rendered invisible in the very moment when ostensibly our new chancellor was paying homage to the sacred teaching and research mission of our public urban university.
Remembering this, I thought about an article I had just completed for Labor Notes on the struggle of 1,500 local gas workers who are standing up to the utility giant National Grid, specifically by refusing to allow their employer to deny future workers the benefits that they themselves enjoy. Before they were locked out, these United Steelworkers expressed a willingness to strike rather than give in to the company’s demands that new hires won’t get the same health benefits and pension package that current workers get. The gas workers did so not only because it was the right thing to do, but because they saw clearly that allowing the company to degrade the conditions of future employees would ultimately undermine their own power as well, and their profession as a whole.
Imagine if the tenured faculty of our profession followed their example and refused to accept the management plan for reproducing and expanding a two-tier academic labor system.
Imagine if tenured folks a generation ago, or those protected by tenure today, recognized that by allowing university administrations to create more and more teaching positions without benefits, livable salaries, job security, or support for research, they were ultimately undermining their own power on campus, as well as the future of their profession.
Imagine if these protected and relatively privileged academic workers had the foresight, the solidarity, and the courage to stand and refuse to disown their present and future colleagues — not to mention their students — coming up behind.
Wouldn’t we be in a radically different place today?
Having failed to fight together for the next generation (with too few exceptions), tenured professors now find their numbers, and thus their power, dwindling, and their service loads rising, in the face of aggressive administrations bent on running colleges like corporations. Assistant professors, and those seeking that special status, hustle full-time, desperate not to fall back into the invisible ranks of the adjunct. Meanwhile, most of the actually existing full-time faculty in the United States scramble to make ends meet, working at two or even three institutions at a time, often not knowing where we will be teaching a year from now. Why is it that so many our most esteemed professors can’t see what the unionized steelworkers see so clearly: that an attack on the future generation is an attack on the profession as a whole — and on the public we serve?
I am thankful to be at a university where we have a union, one that tries to represent all faculty on campus. I am thankful also to be in a department where I am treated with respect, like an actual colleague — even if my teaching schedule often makes it impossible to attend department meetings. But even here, at UMB, nontenure track faculty still have no representation on our Faculty Council, are not eligible for various pockets of travel money (regardless of the research we are doing), and are often denied equal pay for equal work. We have a long ways to go.
Where to begin? How about here: Too many of us, even those I see as model comrades and allies on other fronts, tacitly accept the idea that the two-tier system dividing higher-ed faculty is something natural, to be accepted and adapted to — at best something to be ameliorated — rather than something to be abolished.
I look forward to the day when I can raise a glass to tenured achievement, standing beside all my honored colleagues, without this gnawing ambivalence in my gut.
