Cedric Robinson's anthropology of Marxism

Race and Class

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 23-38

  Gordon, Avery F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Black radical tradition; Historical materialism; Marcuse; Marxism; Utopia

Indexed keywords

EID: 27644591194     PISSN: 03063968     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0306396805058079     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Cedric J. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2001), p. 1.
2. The phrase is from Herbert Marcuse, The end of Utopia', in Five Lectures: psychoanalysis, politics and Utopia (trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber) (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1970), p. 69.
3. See Avery F. Gordon, 'Some thoughts on the Utopian', in Keeping Good Time: reflections on knowledge, power and people (Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers, 2004), pp. 113-32.
4. Cedric J. Robinson, The Terms of Order: political science and the myth of leadership (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1980);
5. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition (London, Zed, 1983);
6. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York, Routledge, 1997). In addition to these major books, Robinson has written many essays, some of which have been collected in a still untitled volume to be published by Africa World Press. A new edition of Black Marxism is available from the University of North Carolina Press.
7. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International (trans. Peggy Kamuf) (New York, Routledge, 1994), p. 175.
8. Robinson, Black Marxism, op. cit., p. 2.
9. Robinson, Black Marxism Ibid., p. 3.
10. Robinson, Black Marxism Ibid. p. 3.
11. It has been my impression that often the title Black Marxism has been misconstrued as describing the identity of its author. In case it bears making more explicit, I do not think it is accurate to describe Robinson as a 'Black Marxist'.
12. Robinson, Black Marxism, op. cit., p. 96.
13. The published origin of this critique is actually The Terms of Order. And, as Helen Quan pointed out to me, despite its prior publication date, Black Movements in America is usefully read as an application of the themes and concerns explored in Anthropology. Particularly notable are its attention to the signal role of women and the Black Church in the history of mass Black political movements in America and its analytic focus on visions of social justice based, in Fanon's formulation, on 'the persistence and organization of oppression', rather than merely on 'the organization of production' (p. 134). It might be worth noting here one way in which An Anthropology of Marxism departs from Black Marxism. The departure is not, I think, to be located in what appears to be the obvious contrast between a Black radical tradition conceived as 'the negation of Western civilization' and a socialist tradition squarely located within it, although Anthropology's object of analysis is a choice with tremendous significance for how we understand radical thought and movements today. The departure hinges on what appears to be a radical break in Anthropology with the dialectical power of racial capitalism to issue its most 'formidable opposition'. In Gibson-Graham's terms, Anthropology presumes 'the end of capitalism (as we knew it)' not only as a future-oriented goal, but as a condition for recognising that which 'cements pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action'. See J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a feminist critique of political economy (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 1996)
14. and Black Marxism, op. cit., p. 451.
15. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Penguin, 1968), p. 9. Thompson's definition of class as a 'historical phenomenon' - not a 'structure' or 'even . . . a category' but the mix of the 'raw material of experience and consciousness . . . which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships' - is not unlike what Robinson means when he approaches the socialist tradition as a historical phenomenon.
16. This position has become increasingly popular. For its most succinct statement, see William Greider, The ghost of Marx', in One World Ready or Not: the manic logic of global capitalism (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997).
17. Robinson, Black Marxism, op. cit., p. 245.
18. Robinson, Terms of Order, op. cit., p. 218.
19. Robinson, Terms of Order Ibid. p. 218.
20. This method of critically examining discourse we commonly associate today with Michel Foucault. Robinson, in both Anthropology and Terms of Order, notes the debt to Foucault for 'the bold yet elegant turn by which he reinserted Marxism into bourgeois cosmology'. But there is only a superficial similarity between the two thinkers. For Robinson's critique of Foucault, see The Terms of Order, especially chapters 4 and 6
21. and An Anthropology of Marxism, chapter 4.
22. Robinson, Terms of Order, op. cit., p. xii.
23. Robinson, Black Marxism, op. cit., p. 441.
24. What Robinson intends by the notion of reference is considerably broader than its colloquial meaning: 'The total institutions of Western society - disciplines, modern political parties, State bureaucracies and the scientific establishment - are not merely the germinal arenas for these metaphysics but their reference as well - the analogy of their subsequent application', The Terms of Order, op. cit., p. 131.
25. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, op. cit., p. 114.
26. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism, Ibid., p. 138.
27. Robinson, Anthropology of Marxism Ibid., p. 157.
28. Toni Cade Bambara, 'The education of a storyteller', in Toni Morrison (ed.), Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: fiction, essays and conversations (New York, Pantheon Books, 1996), p. 255.
29. See also Michael Taussig on the case of Roger Casement in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: a study in terror and healing (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1987).
30. Herbert Marcuse, 'Philosophy and critical theory' (1937) in Negations: essays in critical theory (trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro) (London, Free Association Books, 1988), p. 143.
31. Thanks to Angela Davis for bringing this passage to my attention. See also Herbert Marcuse, 'The end of Utopia', in Negations: essays in critical theory op. cit.
32. Ibid. In 'The end of Utopia', Marcuse writes, 'the new possibilities for a human society and its environment can no longer be thought of as continuations of the old, nor even as existing in the same historical continuum. Rather, they presuppose a break . . . they presuppose the qualitative difference between a free society and societies that are still unfree . . . critical theory, which remains indebted to Marx . . . must accommodate within itself the extreme possibilities for freedom that have been only crudely indicated here, the scandal of the qualitative difference.' See 'Some thoughts on the Utopian', in Avery F. Gordon, Keeping Good Time, op. cit.
33. Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: or, historical choices of the twenty-first century (New York, The New Press, 1998), p. 1.
34. I am thinking here not only of what Toni Morrison has taken the beloved to mean, but also of how A. Sivanandan delicately locates it in the interstices of home-based political education and anti-colonial struggle in his magnificent novel When Memory Dies (London, Arcadia Books, 1997).
35. Cedric J. Robinson, 'Manichaeism and multiculturalism', in Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield (eds) Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 122.
36. Cedric Robinson, 'Introduction', in Richard Wright, White Man, Listen! (New York, HarperPerennial, 1995), p. xx.