As much as I enjoy dunking on Michael Walzer — and if I can’t dunk on Walzer, I don’t want to be part of your revolution — it might be time to pivot to a more substantial discussion of racial capitalism in general and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism in particular. 1/14

I actually have significant discomfort with Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism and the Black radical tradition. My discomfort here is of a piece with my discomfort with many late-born offshoots of the New Lefts: too culturalist & too invested in a pure outside. 2/14

This comes together in a pointed way in Robinson’s book discussion of CLR James. He lauds the revolutionaries of Haiti (& the Black radical tradition more generally) for having “constructed their own revolutionary culture,” apart from the ideas of the bourgeoisie. 3/14

These are the stakes of Robinson’s book: to find/create a revolutionary Black culture autonomous from both European history and the bourgeoisie — something the European socialist tradition, including Marxism, can never provide. 4/14

But this leads him to posit an unbroken African cultural heritage as the repository “of languages and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality.” “African labor brought the past with it,” a past that “infected” the slave system (pp. 121-2). 5/14

The implication seems to be that the autonomy of the Black radical tradition is secured by its origin in a clean, precapitalist African past.

And this identification of the origin of struggle and revolution is mirrored in another origin story, the origin of capitalism. 6/14

In the first paragraph of chapte 1, Robinson indicates that, for him, capitalism is racial b/c “racism & nationalism” of the European variety predate capitalism and influence its development at every step. 7/14

Capitalism as it developed into a world system was always tied up with these “particularistes forces,” and so never escaped its origins in primitive accumulation, which Robinson equates with imperialist accumulation. 8/14

Hence, at least in these elementary and programmatic declarations, Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism and the BRT minimize the critique of political economy in favor of 1) excavating the cultural and ideological elements of Eurocentric racism and bourgeois classism, and 9/14

2) unearthing the culture and ideology of a pure resistance and revolt, a buried treasure.

When these basic theoretical commitments are isolated from the rich historical work by which they are animated, their shortcomings are, I think, clear. 10/14

But these shortcomings are *not* necessary to the theory of racial capitalism or to the construction of a Black radical tradition.

Racialism can be seen to be intrinsic to capitalism because of the necessary stratification of the labor market produces and reproduces... 11/14

...racialized populations — segments of the proletariat that Marx theorizes as the relative surplus population.

And the Black radical tradition does not need to sustain an origin in precapitalist Africa. Both consciousness and freedom struggles have emerged... 12/14

...historically from the practical necessity of thinking through one’s situation, and the situation of those with whose struggles you identify, within a system of social domination. That the ideologies of liberation struggles draw upon all manner of cultural materials... 13/14

...is inescapable. Purity is not an option.

These have been rough, preliminary thoughts on Robinson’s project. But I think it is valuable to take Walzer’s buffoonery as a provocation to think more carefully through the texts he ought to have read. /fin